Automatic prosodic analysis for computer aided pronunciation teaching

Correct pronunciation of spoken language requires the appropriate modulation of acoustic characteristics of speech to convey linguistic information at a suprasegmental level. Such prosodic modulation is a key aspect of spoken language and is an important component of foreign language learning, for purposes of both comprehension and intelligibility. Computer aided pronunciation teaching involves automatic analysis of the speech of a non-native talker in order to provide a diagnosis of the learner's performance in comparison with the speech of a native talker. This thesis describes research undertaken to automatically analyse the prosodic aspects of speech for computer aided pronunciation teaching. It is necessary to describe the suprasegmental composition of a learner's speech in order to characterise significant deviations from a native-like prosody, and to offer some kind of corrective diagnosis. Phonological theories of prosody aim to describe the suprasegmental composition of speech..

Is prosodic production driven by lexical development ? Longitudinal evidence from babble and words

This study investigated the relation between lexical development and the production of prosodic prominence in disyllabic babble and words. Monthly recordings from nine typically developing Belgian-Dutch-speaking infants were analysed from the onset of babbling until a cumulative vocabulary of 200 words was reached. The differentiation between the two syllables of isolated disyllabic utterances was computed for f0, intensity and duration measurements. Results showed that the ambient trochaic pattern emerged in babble, but became enhanced in words. Words showed more prosodic differentiation in terms of f0 and intensity and a more even duration ratio. Age or vocabulary size did not predict the expansion of f0 or intensity in words, whereas vocabulary size was related to the production of more even-timed syllables. The findings are discussed in terms of lexicalist accounts of phonetic development and a potential phonetic highlighting function of first words

Language transfer and positional bias in English stress

This paper shows that L1 transfer may not be effectively maintained in the interlanguage due to confounding factors in the L2. When two factors, A and B, are correlated in the L2, second language learners may only acquire B, even if A is present in the L1. Transfer may not be effective because B, being more robust in the input, conceals A. Native speakers, on the other hand, generalize A in spite of B. The variables in question are weight-sensitivity (A) and positional bias (B) in English, both of which can predict the location of stress in the language. I show that two seemingly target-like groups of second language learners of English (speakers of Mandarin and speakers Portuguese) fail to accurately generalize weight-sensitivity in the language, and instead display response patterns which are predictable given the existing positional bias in English stress

Information Structure, Grammar and Strategy in Discourse

This dissertation examines two information-structural phenomena, Givenness and Focus, from the perspective of both syntax and pragmatics. Evidence from English, German and other languages suggests a split analysis of information structure--the notions of Focus and Givenness, often thought to be closely related, exist independently at two different levels of linguistic representation. Givenness is encoded as a syntactic feature which presupposes salience in prior discourse and either (1) prevents prosodic prominence (in languages like English and German), or (2) drives syntactic movement (in languages like Italian). On the other hand, Focus, which introduces strong prosodic prominence and a contrastive interpretation, exhibits none of the expected properties of a syntactic feature, and is therefore analyzed quite differently. I argue that Focus is the result of purely pragmatic principles which determine utterance choice in the face of grammatical optionality. The syntactic and phonological systems often generate multiple possible formulations of an utterance, and communicative principles can be invoked to explain the correspondences between certain kinds of discourse contexts and certain patterns of linguistic form. The application of communicative principles to problems of utterance choice is modeled mathematically using the tools of game-theoretic pragmatics. From this perspective, utterances are taken to be strategically chosen in order to maximize communicative effectiveness. Ultimately, the strong differences between Focus and Givenness emphasize a methodological point: both syntactic and pragmatic perspectives are necessary to fully determine the space of possibilities in natural language. Neither perspective should be ignored

A model of sonority based on pitch intelligibility

Synopsis: Sonority is a central notion in phonetics and phonology and it is essential for generalizations related to syllabic organization. However, to date there is no clear consensus on the phonetic basis of sonority, neither in perception nor in production. The widely used Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) represents the speech signal as a sequence of discrete units, where phonological processes are modeled as symbol manipulating rules that lack a temporal dimension and are devoid of inherent links to perceptual, motoric or cognitive processes. The current work aims to change this by outlining a novel approach for the extraction of continuous entities from acoustic space in order to model dynamic aspects of phonological perception. It is used here to advance a functional understanding of sonority as a universal aspect of prosody that requires pitch-bearing syllables as the building blocks of speech. This book argues that sonority is best understood as a measurement of pitch intelligibility in perception, which is closely linked to periodic energy in acoustics. It presents a novel principle for sonority-based determinations of well-formedness – the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). Two complementary NAP models independently account for symbolic and continuous representations and they mostly outperform SSP-based models, demonstrated here with experimental perception studies and with a corpus study of Modern Hebrew nouns. This work also includes a description of ProPer (Prosodic Analysis with Periodic Energy). The ProPer toolbox further exploits the proposal that periodic energy reflects sonority in order to cover major topics in prosodic research, such as prominence, intonation and speech rate. The book is finally concluded with brief discussions on selected topics: (i) the phonotactic division of labor with respect to /s/-stop clusters; (ii) the debate about the universality of sonority; and (iii) the fate of the classic phonetics–phonology dichotomy as it relates to continuity and dynamics in phonology

Individual Differences in Speech Production and Perception

Inter-individual variation in speech is a topic of increasing interest both in human sciences and speech technology. It can yield important insights into biological, cognitive, communicative, and social aspects of language. Written by specialists in psycholinguistics, phonetics, speech development, speech perception and speech technology, this volume presents experimental and modeling studies that provide the reader with a deep understanding of interspeaker variability and its role in speech processing, speech development, and interspeaker interactions. It discusses how theoretical models take into account individual behavior, explains why interspeaker variability enriches speech communication, and summarizes the limitations of the use of speaker information in forensics

Focus and intonation in Georgian: Constituent structure and prosodic realization

Skopeteas S, Féry C. Focus and intonation in Georgian: Constituent structure and prosodic realization. Submitted. Draft

Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination