Focus prosody in Japanese-English early bilinguals: A pilot study

Typologically, some languages mark narrow focus with 'post-focus compression' (PFC) while others do not. For those which do, PFC is easily lost through bilingualism, at both societal and individual levels. At the societal level, when in contact with a - PFC language (e.g. Southern Min), a likely +PFC language can lose this prosodic feature (e.g. Taiwan Mandarin) [1]; at the individual level, for bilingual speakers of a +PFC (e.g. Mandarin) and a -PFC (e.g. Southern Min) language, age plays a role in whether they can produce PFC in Mandarin or not [2]. In the latter case, however, the effect of contact and the apparent role of age cannot be teased apart. To better understand how individual characteristics (e.g. age) affect PFC realisation, this study analysed Japanese-English bilinguals, whose two languages are both +PFC. We recruited six early bilingual speakers to complete a speech production task [3] to see if they would produce PFC after narrow focus in Japanese. The results showed that the biracial speakers living in the United Kingdom manifested clear evidence of PFC, whereas another ethnic Japanese speaker who grew up in Japan but identified herself as English-dominant failed to produce PFC. The implications of these findings are discussed

In search of intonational cues to content word beginnings in conversational speech

International audienceWe used an annotated conversational French speech corpus to 1. investigate whether the intonational rises that occur at the beginning of French content words in read speech (APRs) are also present in spontaneous speech and therefore available as cues to word segmentation and lexical access, and 2. test two measures of characterizing intonation patterns using automatically extracted F0 and time values. The two measures tested both proved problematic: they were sensitive to the segmental composition of the critical region. We found no evidence that APRs are reliably present in the corpus as a whole, although we suggest that they may be present in particular types of conversational speech

Integrating Prosodic and Lexical Cues for Automatic Topic Segmentation

We present a probabilistic model that uses both prosodic and lexical cues for the automatic segmentation of speech into topically coherent units. We propose two methods for combining lexical and prosodic information using hidden Markov models and decision trees. Lexical information is obtained from a speech recognizer, and prosodic features are extracted automatically from speech waveforms. We evaluate our approach on the Broadcast News corpus, using the DARPA-TDT evaluation metrics. Results show that the prosodic model alone is competitive with word-based segmentation methods. Furthermore, we achieve a significant reduction in error by combining the prosodic and word-based knowledge sources.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

Corpora compilation for prosody-informed speech processing

Research on speech technologies necessitates spoken data, which is usually obtained through read recorded speech, and specifically adapted to the research needs. When the aim is to deal with the prosody involved in speech, the available data must reflect natural and conversational speech, which is usually costly and difficult to get. This paper presents a machine learning-oriented toolkit for collecting, handling, and visualization of speech data, using prosodic heuristic. We present two corpora resulting from these methodologies: PANTED corpus, containing 250 h of English speech from TED Talks, and Heroes corpus containing 8 h of parallel English and Spanish movie speech. We demonstrate their use in two deep learning-based applications: punctuation restoration and machine translation. The presented corpora are freely available to the research community

Cross-Linguistic Pitch Differences in English and French Bilinguals: Timothée Chalamet and Lily-Rose Depp

Pitch differences between men and women are partially linked to differences in average larynx size. Men have been shown to have a lower pitch range than women due in part to physical factors such as longer larynges. However, even with a natural difference in average pitch in men and women, social factors in various cultures can affect this natural pitch difference, either helping to distinguish men from women or shrinking this gap. Bilinguals have the potential to be active participants in the multiple cultures their fluency allows them to; therefore, I am examining if bilinguals manipulate their average pitch depending on the language they are speaking reflective of social factors. This study looks specifically at two English/French bilingual actors, Timothée Chalamet and Lily-Rose Depp. This study measured their fundamental frequency (F0) using interviews in English and French. The F0 was found to be higher and to have a smaller range (in semitones) in French than English for both informants. These differences in F0 demonstrate that there is a pitch difference between these two bilingual informants when speaking English and French, and future research could analyze if this expands to a larger sample size of English/French bilinguals

A relação entre a prosódia e a estrutura de narrativas espontâneas: um estudo perceptual

O objetivo central do presente estudo foi examinar em que medida a estrutura de narrativas orais espontâneas é reconhecida por examinadores inexperientes e leigos, e, como corolário, demonstrar qual o papel que as pistas prosódicas têm nesse processo de reconhecimento. Para isso, um protocolo experimental foi desenvolvido, em que narrativas em diferentes condições (só texto, texto e áudio, só áudio e só áudio filtrado) foram apresentadas. Participaram do estudo 48 informantes. Os resultados indicam que, mesmo sem acesso a informações lexicais, sintáticas e semânticas, as pessoas identificam, de forma consistente, uma estrutura discursiva em narrativas espontâneas, o que sugere ter a prosódia um relevante papel na percepção da estrutura discursiva em narrativas orais espontâneas

『日本語話し言葉コーパス』への声質情報付与と予備的分析

National Institute for Japanese Language and LinguisticsNational Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics会議名: 言語資源活用ワークショップ2019, 開催地: 国立国語研究所, 会期: 2019年9月2日−4日, 主催: 国立国語研究所 コーパス開発センター『日本語話し言葉コーパス』コア中の母音に、声質研究用に各種音響特徴量を付与する試みについて報告する。母音の無声化等によって測定不可能な母音を除いたすべての母音を対象に、F0, インテンシティ, F1, F2の平均値、jitter, shimmer, signal to noise ratio, H1*-H2*, H1*-A2, H1*-A3*等の声質関連情報、さらに発話中の位置に関するメタ情報などを付与し、RDBで検索可能とした。この情報の応用上の可能性を示すために、主要な音響特徴量が発話中の位置に応じてどのような変化を示すかを検討した。F0やインテンシティだけでなく、H1関連指標などにも発話末において一定の値に収束する傾向が認められた

Communicative functions integrate segments in prosodies and prosodies in segments

This paper takes a new look at the traditionally established divide between sounds and prosodies, viewing it as a useful heuristics in language descriptions that focus on the segmental make- up of words. It pleads for a new approach that bridges this reified compartmentalization of speech in a more global communicative perspective. Data are presented from a German perception experiment in the framework of the Semantic Differential that shows interdependence of f0 contours and the spectral characteristics of a following fricative segment, for the expression of semantic functions along the scales questioning - asserting, excited - calm, forceful - not forceful, contrary - agreeable. The results lead to the conclusion that segments shape prosodies and are shaped by them in varying ways in the coding of semantic functions. This implies that the analysis of sentence prosodies needs to integrate the manifestation of segments, just as the analysis of segments needs to consider their prosodic embedding. In communicative interaction, speakers set broad prosodic time windows of varying sizes, and listeners respond to them. So, future phonetic research needs to concentrate on speech analysis in such windows