Annotating information structure in a corpus of spoken Danish

This paper presents the work done to annotate a corpus of spoken Danish with information structure tags, and describes a preliminary study in which the corpus has been used to investigate the relation between focus and intra-clausal pauses. The study indicates that the pauses that do fall within the focus domain, tend to precede property-expressing words by which the object in focus is distinguished from other similar ones.peer-reviewe

Variation and change in the use of hesitation markers in Germanic languages

In this study, we investigate crosslinguistic patterns in the alternation between UM, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel followed by a final labial nasal, and UH, a hesitation marker consisting of a neutral vowel in an open syllable. Based on a quantitative analysis of a range of spoken and written corpora, we identify clear and consistent patterns of change in the use of these forms in various Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese) and dialects (American English, British English), with the use of UM increasing over time relative to the use of UH. We also find that this pattern of change is generally led by women and more educated speakers. Finally, we propose a series of possible explanations for this surprising change in hesitation marker usage that is currently taking place across Germanic languages

EXMARaLDA - Creating, Analysing and Sharing Spoken Language Corpora for Pragmatic Research

This paper presents EXMARaLDA, a system for the computer-assisted creation and analysis of spoken language corpora. The first part contains some general observations about technological and methodological requirements for doing corpus-based pragmatics. The second part explains the systems architecture and gives an overview of its most important software components a transcription editor, a corpus management tool and a corpus query tool. The last part presents some corpora which have been or are currently being compiled with the help of EXMARaLDA

Feedback and gestural behaviour in a conversational corpus of Danish

Proceedings of the 3rd Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication. Editors: Patrizia Paggio, Elisabeth Ahlsén, Jens Allwood, Kristiina Jokinen, Costanza Navarretta. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 15 (2011), 33–39. © 2011 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/22532

Articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech increases as a function of the age of the child even when surprisal is controlled for

In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled for. In this paper we show on utterance level in spontaneous Swedish speech that i) for the youngest children, articulation rate in CDS is lower than in adult-directed speech (ADS), ii) there is a significant negative correlation between articulation rate and surprisal (the negative log probability) in ADS, and iii) the increase in articulation rate in Swedish CDS as a function of the age of the child holds, even when surprisal along with utterance length and differences in articulation rate between speakers are controlled for. These results indicate that adults adjust their articulation rate to make it fit the linguistic capacity of the child.Comment: 5 pages, Interspeech 201

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