Neutralization in Aztec Phonology – the Case of Classical Nahuatl Nasals

This article investigates nasal assimilation in Classical Nahuatl. The distribution of nasal consonants is shown to be the result of coda neutralization. It is argued that generalizations made for root and word level are disproportionate and cannot be explained through the means of rule-based phonology. It is shown that the process responsible for nasal distribution can only be accounted for by introducing derivational levels in Optimality Theor

BAStat : New Statistical Resources at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals

A new type of language resource ’BAStat’ has been released by the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals. In contrast to primary resources like speech and text corpora BAStat comprises statistical estimates based on a number of primary resources: first and second order occurrence probability of phones, syllables and words, duration statistics, probabilities of pronunciation variants of words and probabilities of context information. Unlike other statistical speech resources BAStat is based solely on recordings of conversational German and therefore models spoken language. It consists of 7-bit ASCII tables and matrices to maximize inter-operability between different platforms and can be downloaded from the BAS web-site. This paper gives a detailed description about the empirical basis, the contained data types, some interesting interpretations and a brief comparison to the text-based statistical resource CELEX

German glide formation functionally viewed

Glide formation, a process whereby an underlying high front vowel is realized as a palatal glide, is shown to occur only in unstressed prevocalic position in German, and to be blocked by specific surface restrictions such as *ji and *“j. Traditional descriptions of glide formation (including derivational as well as Optimality theoretic approaches) refer to the syllable in order to capture its conditions. The present study illustrates that glide formation (plus the distribution of long and short tense /i/) in German can better be captured in a Functional Phonology account (Boersma 1998) which makes reference to stress instead of the syllable and thus overcomes problems of former approaches

AutoRapper - Automatic Alignment of Speech with a Rhythm

Tato práce popisuje návrh a implementaci aplikace, která automaticky převádí vstupní řeč na rap. Tento proces je založen na zarovnání řeči s rytmem, které je dosaženo pomocí rozpoznávání fonémù, slabikování a časové modifikáce řeči. Další funkce, jako je hudební podklad a vokální efekt jsou přidány za účelem přiblížení se ke skutečnému rapu. Výsledná aplikace je dostupná jako webová služba pro uživatele.This thesis describes a design and implementation of an application that automatically converts the input speech recording into a rap. This process is based on alignment of speech with a rhythm, which is achieved by phoneme recognition, syllabification and time-scale modification. The external features such as beat and vocal effect are added in order to make the resulting signal as close as possible to the real rap. The resulting application runs as a web service available to the users.

Allomorphic Variation of Definite Articles in Jersey: a Sonority Based Account

Allomorphic variation is a common linguistic phenomenon in Jersey (Jersey Norman French). Definite articles in Jersey each have at least two allomorphs. The occurrence of each allomorph has been attributed to the composition of word initial syllable following the article (Liddicoat 1994). Instead of using a ruled-based approach, this thesis examines the variation found among Jersey definite articles and uses sonority-based principles to analyze the allomorphic variation. Using Jersey phonotactics, this thesis first puts forth a Jersey specific sonority hierarchy and then utilizes that hierarchy and principles of syllabification to syllabify phrases containing definite articles. Then using sonority based principles, such as the Sonority Sequencing Principle and Syllable Contact Law, this thesis analyzes the syllabified phrases. The analysis identifies the sonority based conditions that trigger the allomorphic variation found in the data. This thesis contributes to the field of linguistics in several ways. It supports the use of both the Universal Sonority Hierarchy and language specific sonority hierarchies. This thesis also supports the practice of using available data sources for analysis. The analysis of a described but analyzed phenomenon contributes valuable information to the general knowledge of Jersey and sonority. Finally, this thesis also serves as an important resource for the study of Norman dialects in Europe such as Guernsey, Sark and Norman, as Jersey is a member of this linguistic group. This thesis contributes to both the field of Jersey linguistics and to the field of theoretical linguistics, while accounting for the allomorphic variation of Jersey definite articles

Incorporating Pronunciation Variation into Different Strategies of Term Transliteration

Term transliteration addresses the problem of converting terms in one language into their phonetic equivalents in the other language via spoken form. It is especially concerned with proper nouns, such as personal names, place names and organization names. Pronunciation variation refers to pronunciation ambiguity frequently encountered in spoken language, which has a serious impact on term transliteration. More than one transliteration variants can be generated by an out-of-vocabulary term due to different kinds of pronunciation variations. It is important to take this issue into account when dealing with term transliteration. Several models, which take pronunciation variation into consideration, are proposed for term transliteration in this paper. They describe transliteration from various viewpoints and utilize the relationships trained from extracted transliterated-term pairs. An experiment in applying the proposed models to term transliteration was conducted and evaluated. The experimental results show promise. These proposed models are not only applicable to term transliteration, but also are helpful in indexing and retrieving spoken document retrieval

English Speech Synthesizer with Speech Error Processing Features: Elision and Assimilation

Speech synthesis is one of the in Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a subfield ofartificial intelligence and linguistic. It studies the problem ofprocessing and manipulation natural language and from the studies it process to make the computer understand human language. NLP have a lot ofmajor task such as text to speech that is speech synthesizer, speech recognition, machine translation, information retrieval, and many more In this projects, the system are involve a massive usage of rules to syllabify the words into their respective syllables and to check for English elision and English assimilation rules ifany before the correct output ofsound can be produced. Elision is omission of one sound or more. The letter that involves elision is sounded unfamiliar for the speaker. Whereby, assimilation is concern with one sound becoming phonetically same with the adjacent sound. In this project, I demonstrate the syllabification approach that been introduced to me by Norshuhani, and will also adopt the English elision and assimilation rules to the speech synthesizer.

Developing Resources for Automated Speech Processing of Quebec French

International audienceThe analysis of the structure of speech nearly always rests on the alignment of the speech recording with a phonetic transcription. Nowadays several tools can perform this speech segmentation automatically. However, none of them carries out the automatic segmentation of Quebec French (QF hereafter) in a proper way. Contrary to what could be assumed, the acoustics and phonotactics of QF differs widely from that of France French (FF hereafter). To adequately segment QF, features like diphthongization of long vowels and affrication of coronal stops have to be taken into account. Thus acoustic models for automatic segmentation must be trained on speech samples exhibiting those phenomena. Dictionaries and lexicons must also be adapted and integrate differences in lexical units (such as very frequent words in QF that are not used in FF) and in the phonology of QF (such as the existence of tense and lax high vowels in QF but not in FF). This paper presents the development of linguistic resources to be included into the SPPAS software tool in order to get Text normalization, Phonetization, Alignment and Syllabification. We adapted the existing French lexicon and developed a QF-specific pronunciation dictionary. We then created an acoustic model from the existing ones and adapted it with 5 minutes of manually time-aligned data. These new resources are all freely distributed with SPPAS version 2.7; they perform the full process of speech segmentation in Quebec French