Assessing respiratory contributions to f0 declination in German across varying speech tasks and respiratory demands

International audienceMany past studies have sought to determine the factors that affect f0 declination, and the physiological underpinnings of the phenomenon. This study assessed the relation between respiration and f0 declination by means of simultaneous acoustic and respiratory recordings from read and spontaneous speech from speakers of German. Within the respective Intonational Phrase unit, we analysed the effect of the number of syllables and voiceless obstruents. Both factors could influence the slope of either f0 declination or rib cage movement. If respiration and f0 declination are related physiologically, their relationship might also be modulated by either one or both factors. Our results show consistently for both speech tasks that the slope of the rib cage movement is not related with f0 declination when length and consonant content vary. Furthermore f0 slopes are generally shallower in spontaneous than in read speech. Finally, although a higher number of voiceless obstruents yielded a greater rib cage compression, it did not affect f0 declination. These results suggest that although f0 declination occurs in many languages, it might not have a purely physiological origin in breathing, but rather reflects cognitive processing which allows speakers to look ahead when planning their utterances

Parameterization of F0 register and discontinuity to predict prosodic boundary strength in Hungarian spontaneous speech

This study addresses the questions how to parameterize (1) aspects of fundamental frequency (F0) register, i.e. time-varying F0 level and range within prosodic phrases and (2) F0 discontinuities at prosodic boundaries in order to predict perceived prosodic boundary strength in Hungarian spontaneous speech. For F0 register stylization we propose a new fitting procedure for base-, mid-, and toplines that does not require error-prone local peak and valley detection and is robust against disturbing influences of high pitch accents and boundary tones. From these linear stylizations we extracted features which reflect F0 boundary discontinuities and fitted stepwise linear regression and regression tree models to predict perceived boundary strength. In a ten-fold cross-validation the mean correlation between predictions and human judgments amounts up to 0.8

Comparing parameterizations of pitch register and its discontinuities at prosodic boundaries for Hungarian

We examined how well prosodic boundary strength can be captured by two declination stylization methods as well as by four different representations of pitch register. In the stylization proposed by Liebermann et al. (1985) base- and topline are fitted to peaks and valleys of the pitch contour, whereas in Reichel&Mády (2013) these lines are fitted to medians below and above certain pitch percentiles. From each of the stylizations four feature pools were induced representing different aspects of register discontinuity at word boundaries: discontinuities related to the base-, mid-, and topline, as well as to the range between base- and topline. Concerning stylization the median-based fitting approach turned out to be more robust with respect to declination line crossing errors and yielded base-, topline and range-related discontinuity characteristics with higher correlations to perceived boundary strength. Concerning register representation, for the peak/valley fitting approach the base- and topline patterns showed weaker correspondences to boundary strength than the other feature pools. We furthermore trained generalized linear regression models for boundary strength prediction on each feature pool. It turned out that neither the stylization method nor the register representation had a significant influence on the overall good prediction performance

Measures of the sentence intonation of read and spontaneous speech in American English

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/77/2/10.1121/1.391883.The visual abstraction procedure used in previous studies of declination was tested using 12 subjects who each fit the F 0 contours of 19 spoken short simple sentences with baselines. These baselines were found to be poorly replicated by the fitters. An objective all‐points least‐squares best‐fit procedure was tested on this corpus and on a set of sentences that had been produced in both spontaneous and read speech by six speakers. The all‐points linear regression line was a better descriptor of the F 0 contours than either baselines or toplines. Declination did not always occur in these simple declarative sentences; there was more variation present in the F 0 contours of sentences that had been uttered during spontaneous speech; 35% of the spontaneous sentences did not show declination; 45% of these sentences better fit the breath‐group model. Their F 0 contours could be described by a level all‐points linear regression line followed by a falling terminal segment

Prosodic Phrasing in Spontaneous Swedish

One of the most important functions of prosody is to divide the flow of speech into chunks. The chunking, or prosodic phrasing, of speech plays an important role in both the production and perception of speech. This study represents a move away from the laboratory speech examined in previous, related studies on prosodic phrasing in Swedish, since a spontaneous, Southern Swedish speech material is investigated. The study is, however, not primarily intended as a study of the Southern Swedish dialect; rather Southern Swedish is used as a convenient object on which to test various hypotheses about the phrasing function of prosody in spontaneous speech. The study comprises both analyses of production data and perception experiments, and both the phonetics and phonology of prosodic phrasing is dealt with. First, the distribution of prosodic phrase boundaries in spontaneous speech is examined by considering it as a reflection of optimality theoretic constraints that restrain the production and perception of speech. Secondly, the phonetic realization of prosodic phrase boundaries is investigated in a study on articulation rate changes within the prosodic phrase. Evidence of phrase-final lengthening, a reduction of the articulation rate in the final part of the prosodic phrase, is found. The tonal means used to signal coherence within the prosodic phrase is subsequently investigated. An attempt is made to test the two Lund intonation models’ capacities for describing spontaneous speech. The two approaches have different implications for the amount of preplanning needed, which makes them particularly interesting to compare by testing spontaneous data. The results indicate that no or little preplanning is needed to produce tonally coherent phrases. No evidence is found to suggest e.g. that speakers accommodate for the length of the upcoming phrase by starting longer phrases with a higher F0 than short phrases. An explanation is sought for variation in F0 starting points found in the data despite F0’s insensitivity to phrase length. It is concluded that F0 is used to signal coherence even across prosodic phrase boundaries. It is furthermore found that tonal coherence signals are used to override strong boundary signals in spontaneous speech, thereby making initially unplanned additions possible. Finally, the perception of boundary strength is examined in two perception experiments. Listeners are found to agree well in their perceptual judgments of boundary strength, and it is shown that the main correlate to perceived boundary strength in spontaneous speech is pause length. The useful distinction between weak, prosodic phrase boundaries and strong, prosodic utterance boundaries in descriptions of read speech is found to be inappropriate for descriptions of spontaneous speech. It fails to capture the conflicting local and global signals of boundary strength and coherence that arise when strong boundary signals are overriden by coherence signals. The possibility to use conflicting signals in this way is seen as an important asset to the speaker as it makes changes in the speech plan possible, and it is regarded to be a characteristic of prosodic phrasing in spontaneous speech

Reading prosody in Spanish dyslexics

Reading becomes expressive when word and text reading are quick, accurate and automatic. Recent studies have reported that skilled readers use greater pitch changes and fewer irrelevant pauses than poor readers. Given that developmental dyslexics have difficulty acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and developing orthographic representations of words, it is possible that their use of prosody when reading differs from that of typical readers. The goal of this study was to investigate whether the reading prosody of Spanish-speaking dyslexics differs from that of typical Spanish readers. Two experiments were performed. The first experiment involved 36 children (18 with dyslexia), and the second involved 46 adults (23 with dyslexia). Participants were asked to read aloud a text which included declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences. Data on pausing and reading rate (number of pauses, duration of pauses and utterances), pitch changes, intensity changes and syllable lengthening were extracted from the recordings. We found that dyslexic people read more slowly than typical readers and they also made more inappropriate and longer pauses, even as adults with considerable reading experience. We also observed that dyslexics differed from skilled readers in their use of some prosodic features, particularly pitch changes at the end of sentences. This is probably because they have trouble anticipating some structural features of prose, such as sentence ends.Proyecto de Investigación del Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad: PSI2012-31913 Programa Severo Ochoa (FICYT): BP14-03