Evaluating pause particles and their functions in natural and synthesized speech in laboratory and lecture settings

Pause-internal phonetic particles (PINTs) comprise a variety of phenomena including: phonetic-acoustic silence, inhalation and exhalation breath noises, filler particles “uh” and “um” in English, tongue clicks, and many others. These particles are omni-present in spontaneous speech, however, they are under-researched in both natural speech and synthetic speech. The present work explores the influence of PINTs in small-context recall experiments, develops a bespoke speech synthesis system that incorporates the PINTs pattern of a single speaker, and evaluates the influence of PINTs on recall for larger material lengths, namely university lectures. The benefit of PINTs on recall has been documented in natural speech in small-context laboratory settings, however, this area of research has been under-explored for synthetic speech. We devised two experiments to evaluate if PINTs have the same recall benefit for synthetic material that is found with natural material. In the first experiment, we evaluated the recollection of consecutive missing digits for a randomized 7-digit number. Results indicated that an inserted silence improved recall accuracy for digits immediately following. In the second experiment, we evaluated sentence recollection. Results indicated that sentences preceded by an inhalation breath noise were better recalled than those with no inhalation. Together, these results reveal that in single-sentence laboratory settings PINTs can improve recall for synthesized speech. The speech synthesis systems used in the small-context recall experiments did not provide much freedom in terms of controlling PINT type or location. Therefore, we endeavoured to develop bespoke speech synthesis systems. Two neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems were created: one that used PINTs annotation labels in the training data, and another that did not include any PINTs labeling in the training material. The first system allowed fine-tuned control for inserting PINTs material into the rendered material. The second system produced PINTs probabilistally. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first TTS systems to render tongue clicks. Equipped with greater control of synthesized PINTs, we returned to evaluating the recall benefit of PINTs. This time we evaluated the influence of PINTs on the recollection of key information in lectures, an ecologically valid task that focused on larger material lengths. Results indicated that key information that followed PINTs material was less likely to be recalled. We were unable to replicate the benefits of PINTs found in the small-context laboratory settings. This body of work showcases that PINTs improve recall for TTS in small-context environments just like previous work had indicated for natural speech. Additionally, we’ve provided a technological contribution via a neural TTS system that exerts finer control over PINT type and placement. Lastly, we’ve shown the importance of using material rendered by speech synthesis systems in perceptual studies.This research was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) within the project “Pause-internal phonetic particles in speech communication” (project number: 418659027; project IDs: MO 597/10-1 and TR 468/3-1). Associate member of SFB1102 “Information Density and Linguistic Encoding” (project number: 232722074)

Studies in theory and method in sociolinguistics

PhD ThesisProblems raised in a pilot linguistic survey of a street in Newcastle upon Tyne (Pellowe 1967) are here treated positively. An informal normative model of the hearer's treatment of the speaker's output is developed in terms both of psychological processing and of social interpretation. This model is then interpreted methodologically and used to generate an analytical framework and a set of mete-interpretive procedures. These are tested in various ways on samples of speech from members of the Tyneside speech community, on experimental groups of hearers and speakers, and on various miscellaneous data. The generality, replicability and accountability of the methods are examined, and the consequences of the model and its techniques are contrasted with those of other studies

Proceedings of the 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the SMC2010 - 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference, July 21st - July 24th 2010

The Strategic Content of Island Constraints

This issue of Working Papers in Linguistics is a slightly modified version of Alexander Grosu's Ph.D. dissertation from The Ohio State University (submitted to the Graduate School in August, 1972)

Mathematical linguistics

but in fact this is still an early draft, version 0.56, August 1 2001. Please d

Bend, Engage, Wait, and Watch: Rethinking Political Agency in a World of Flows

We inhabit an era of accelerated pace and a precarity of being that rivals vulnerabilities encountered regularly by the Greek polis. And yet our operative conceptions of political agency have yet to catch up with this condition. Drawing initially upon Sophocles and Lucretius, this study seeks to retune modern models of agency to fit the late-modern condition. As you work creatively upon Sophocles to appreciate the swerve in Lucretius, the wisdom of minor characters in his tragic trilogy becomes even more visible, particularly as they respond with flexibility and insight to surprising events and binds. We next turn to Catherine Malabou’s exploration of body/brain “plasticity”, to bolster and extend these insights. Friedrich Nietzsche is drawn upon to teach us the importance of periodic hesitation, as we allow multifarious intensities to work upon us in the hopes that a new, creative response will bubble up to respond to an uncanny event. The focus on flexibility, plasticity, periodic hesitation, creativity, and cultivation of existential gratitude is carried into contemporary life through an analysis of media techniques adopted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. By parodying the rhythm, pace and tone of news programs, these commentators teach us both how the media work on the passive syntheses that infuse agency and how we can turn its operations into creative political thinking and action. The study ends by examining Machiavelli on the precarious relations between virtu and fortuna through the lens of these strategies, doing so to retune our practices of political agency

Advances in Robotics, Automation and Control

The book presents an excellent overview of the recent developments in the different areas of Robotics, Automation and Control. Through its 24 chapters, this book presents topics related to control and robot design; it also introduces new mathematical tools and techniques devoted to improve the system modeling and control. An important point is the use of rational agents and heuristic techniques to cope with the computational complexity required for controlling complex systems. Through this book, we also find navigation and vision algorithms, automatic handwritten comprehension and speech recognition systems that will be included in the next generation of productive systems developed by man