Determination of Formant Features in Czech and Slovak for GMM Emotional Speech Classifier

The paper is aimed at determination of formant features (FF) which describe vocal tract characteristics. It comprises analysis of the first three formant positions together with their bandwidths and the formant tilts. Subsequently, the statistical evaluation and comparison of the FF was performed. This experiment was realized with the speech material in the form of sentences of male and female speakers expressing four emotional states (joy, sadness, anger, and a neutral state) in Czech and Slovak languages. The statistical distribution of the analyzed formant frequencies and formant tilts shows good differentiation between neutral and emotional styles for both voices. Contrary to it, the values of the formant 3-dB bandwidths have no correlation with the type of the speaking style or the type of the voice. These spectral parameters together with the values of the other speech characteristics were used in the feature vector for Gaussian mixture models (GMM) emotional speech style classifier that is currently developed. The overall mean classification error rate achieves about 18 %, and the best obtained error rate is 5 % for the sadness style of the female voice. These values are acceptable in this first stage of development of the GMM classifier that should be used for evaluation of the synthetic speech quality after applied voice conversion and emotional speech style transformation

The most important prosodic patterns of Hungarian

Prosody is a general term for the following features in speech: pitch and intonation, stress, articulation rate, sound intensity and time structure (rhythm and pauses). During verbal communication various prosodic forms contribute to the expression of the content of the message (the information carried by the text, emotional expression, to imitate a situation etc.). So, prosody can be represented as a multivariable function in which the number of variables is rather high. Therefore it is difficult to describe the complex process for all situations, meanings, and emotions. In this paper we try to give a phonetic level characterization  of pitch and intonation structure and also the function of intensity in time of the main Hungarian sentence types (using a  unified description). The manner of description is new concerning Hungarian. It is based on a unified relative  scale in which not physical values but relative distances in pitch values and intensity  are used to characterize the melody forms and the intensity levels. This description allows for the representation of these two prosodic elements independently of the personal features (mean F0 value, the range of the F0 of the speaker, etc.). The representation makes it possible to express the crossfunctions among the melody forms of different expressions. This means that complete prosodic patterns can be predicted for any text without an acoustic analysis

Discourse markers in emotional contexts

En este trabajo analizaremos los marcadores del discurso que se sitúan en las reacciones emotivas de una conversación coloquial, con el fin de comprobar si a sus funciones habituales de argumentación, reformulación, etc. y a sus funciones metadiscursivas de control del discurso puede añadírsele también la función metadiscursiva de anuncio de reacción emotiva. Las unidades conversacionales seleccionadas están, pues, marcadas por algún tipo de fuerza ilocutiva expresiva o emotiva. Nos situamos, así, en la línea de las investigaciones que está llevando a cabo el Grupo Fonoemoción en el seno del Proyecto EHSEE (Padilla et alii, 2017) y que suponen una nueva aportación a los estudios del llamado “discurso emotivo”. A él se acercan disciplinas lingüísticas como la fonopragmática (Rittaud-Hutinet 1995; Acuña 2011; Carbajal et alii 2014) o la fonocortesía (Hidalgo 2007; Hidalgo et alii 2010; Estellés 2013), interesadas en la relación entre el valor contextual de los enunciados y su reflejo fónico en el habla. La observación y el análisis de la conversación coloquial espontánea nos muestran que el habla se presenta continuamente como un reflejo de las emociones, de las actitudes y de los sentimientos de los usuarios (Cowie y Cornelius 2003; Padilla 2004; 2017; 2020; 2021). Para llevar a cabo esta investigación, y partiendo de la división de seis emociones básicas de Ekman (1970; 1999), se ha analizado un corpus de ochenta y nueve intervenciones emotivas procedentes de dos conversaciones coloquiales reales. Se han tomado como unidades de análisis conversacional la intervención, el acto y el subacto (Briz y Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2003; Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2014) y se han localizado quince marcadores discursivos diferentes. Aunque, dada la extensión de la muestra, aún no pueden extraerse conclusiones definitivas, sí se apuntan algunas tendencias, como la preferencia de aparición de los marcadores en las reacciones emotivas de sorpresa y enfado o la aparición del valor metadiscursivo de “anuncio de reacción emotiva” común a todos ellos.This paper analyzes the role of discourse markers that are placed in the emotional reactions of a colloquial conversation, trying to see whether a metadiscursive function of “emotional reaction trigger” can be added to their usual functions of argumentation, reformulation, etc. and their usual metadiscursive functions of discourse dynamics control. The selected conversational units are therefore marked by some kind of expressive or emotional illocutive force. Thus, we are in line with the research that the Fonoemotion Group is carrying out within the EHSEE Project (Padilla et alii, 2017) and which represent a new contribution to the studies of the so-called “emotional discourse”. It is approached by linguistic disciplines such as phonopragmatics (Rittaud-Hutinet 1995; Acuña 2011; Carbajal et alii 2014) or phonocortesy (Hidalgo 2007; Hidalgo et alii 2010; Estellés 2013), interested in the relationship between the contextual value of the utterances and their phonic reflection in speech. The observation and analysis of spontaneous colloquial conversation show us that speech is often presented as a reflection of the emotions, attitudes and feelings of speakers (Cowie and Cornelius 2003; Padilla 2004; 2017; 2020; 2021). To carry out this research and based on the division of Ekman’s six core emotions (1970; 1999), a corpus of eighty-nine emotional utterances from two real colloquial conversations has been analyzed. Utterance, act and subact have been taken as units of conversational analysis (Briz and Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2003; Grupo Val.Es.Co. 2014) and fifteen different discourse markers have been located. Although, given the extent of the sample, definitive conclusions cannot yet be drawn, some trends are noticed, such as the preference of markers for appearing in the emotional reactions of surprise and anger or the trace of the metadiscourse function of “emotional reaction trigger” common to all of them

Prozodické členění u dobrých mluvčích v angličtině a češtině

Cílem této bakalářské práce bylo porovnat prozodické členění u dobrých mluvčích angličtiny a češtiny. Na základě neformálního pozorování mluvené angličtiny a češtiny v každodenní komunikaci se zdá, že česká intonace je plošší a mluvčí češtiny rozdělují proud řeči na delší prozodické fráze než mluvčí angličtiny. Zaměřili jsme se na projev dobrých řečníků, abychom zjistili, zda jsou v této stylistické oblasti mezi těmito dvěma jazyky rozdíly v temporálních a melodických charakteristikách. Analyzovali jsme úseky z projevů 10 řečníků na konferenci TEDTalk v češtině a americké angličtině a změřili délku prosodických frází, mluvní tempo, směrodatnou odchylku základní frekvence v rámci prozodické fráze a v melodémové části (míra intonačního rozpětí) a Cumulative Slope Index v rámci prozodické fráze (míra melodické variability). Počet slabik za frázi byl naměřen vyšší v češtině než v angličtině, ačkoli fráze byly obecně velmi krátké v obou jazycích. Mluvní tempo bylo naměřeno rychlejší v češtině než v angličtině. Intonační rozpětí jak v rámci celé fráze, tak v melodémové části bylo naměřeno větší v angličtině než v češtině. Melodická variabilita byla naměřena vyšší v angličtině než v češtině. Tyto výsledky ukazují, že existují rozdíly v prozodickém členění mezi češtinou a angličtinou u dobrých řečníků a že...The aim of this BA thesis was to compare prosodic phrasing in good public speakers of English and Czech. Naive observations of English and Czech spoken in everyday communication suggest that Czech intonation is more flat and that Czech speakers divide the flow of speech into longer prosodic phrases than English speakers. We focused on the speech of good public speakers to see whether there are differences in the temporal and melodic characteristics between the two languages in this stylistic domain. We analysed segments from speeches by 10 TEDTalk speakers in Czech and American English and measured the length of prosodic phrases, speaking rate, standard deviation of the fundamental frequency in each prosodic phrase and in the nuclear part of the phrase (measure of pitch span), and Cumulative Slope Index in each prosodic phrase (measure of melodic variability). The number of syllables per prosodic phrase was found to be higher in Czech than in English, although phrases were generally very short in both languages. Speaking rate was found to be faster in Czech than in English. Pitch span in both the whole prosodic phrase and the nuclear part of the phrase was found to be wider in English than in Czech. Melodic variability was found to be higher in English than Czech. These results show that there are...Ústav anglického jazyka a didaktikyDepartment of the English Language and ELT MethodologyFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art

When your native language sounds foreign: A phonetic investigation into first language attrition

The research presented in this thesis comprises two experiments which investigated whether the domain of phonetics can undergo first language attrition, or be lost, when a second language is acquired in adulthood in a migrant context. Experiment I investigated the native speech of 57 German migrants to Anglophone Canada and the Dutch Netherlands. The bilingual migrants had grown up in a monolingual German environment and moved abroad in adolescence or adulthood. Their semispontaneous German speech was globally assessed for foreign accent by native German speakers in Germany. It was revealed that 14 bilingual migrants were perceived to be non-native speakers of German. Age of arrival to Canada or the Netherlands and contact with one's native language played the most significant roles in determining whether the German speech of the migrants was assessed to be foreign accented. Crucially, it was not only the amount of contact, but also the type of contact which influenced foreign accented native speech. Monolingual settings, in which little language mixing was assumed to occur, were most conducive to maintaining non-foreign accented native German speech. These findings prompted Experiment II, in which the speech of 10 German migrants to Anglophone Canada was examined in fine phonetic detail. The participants in this experiment had similarly grown up in a German speaking environment and migrated to Canada in late adolescence or adulthood. Segmental and prosodic elements of speech, which generally differ between German and English, were selected for acoustic analyses. Given that each phonetic element was measured according to two dimensions, it was possible to determine that in the lateral phoneme /l/, the frequency of F1 was more likely to evidence first language attrition than the frequency of F2; and that in the prenuclear rise, the alignment of the start of the rise was more likely to display first language attrition than the alignment of the end. In addition to intrapersonal variation within the same phonetic variable, interpersonal variation was observed. Two participants evidenced no first language attrition, whilst one participant realised both dimensions of the lateral phoneme /l/ and prenuclear tonal alignment according to the Englishmonolingual norm in his German. When extralinguistic variables were investigated, age of arrival (and neither amount nor type of language contact) had a significant impact on determining first language attrition, although this effect was only observed in the alignment of the prenuclear rise. While the experiments revealed stability in the native speech of late consecutive bilingual migrants, first language attrition in the domain of phonetics was observed at both the level of perception and performance. Taken together, these findings challenge the traditional concept of native speech by revealing that indeed native speakers diverge from the norms of native (monolingual) speech.sub_shsunpub119_ethesesunpu

A Deweyan-Based Curriculum for Teaching Ethical Inquiry in the Language Arts

Informed by Dewey’s account of ethical experience and the nature of philosophical inquiry, my theory of ethical inquiry has four components: body-based reasonableness, moral imagination, emotions as judgments, and ethical content. Bodybased reasonableness is thinking that is critical, creative, committed, contextual, and embodied (Sprod, 2001). Exercising embodied reasonableness in aesthetic education means that we pay critical attention and seek to address the ethical and social aspects of art. We pay attention to fiction that will potentially engage students in a constant process of ethical judgment, depicting characters and situations that call for our moral evaluation. In a similar vein, exposure to certain art can sensitize us to the right reasons and objects for our emotions. Vehicles for ethical inquiry are those by which human situations can be understood and are found in the English Language Arts curriculum and the arts, such as: The Odyssey by Homer, Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, Prokofiev, and Tchaikovsky, The Joy Luck Club by Tan, and works by the artists Frida Kahlo and Kiki Smith. Highlighted are the issues of body, sexuality and gender, principal areas of ethical concern and central to adolescence. The pedagogy by which students can adequately address ethical concerns is Philosophy for Children, where characters in a narrative text exemplify discursive modes of thought and the conduct of ethical inquiry