Speech data acquisition: the underestimated challenge

(This version makes 1 correction to the references: BARBOSA 2012 was cited in the text but missing from the list of references.)International audienceThe second half of the 20th century was the dawn of information technology; and we now live in the digital age. Experimental studies of prosody develop at a fast pace, in the context of an "explosion of evidence" (Janet Pierrehumbert, Speech Prosody 2010, Chicago). The ease with which anyone can now do recordings should not veil the complexity of the data collection process, however. This article aims at sensitizing students and scientists from the various fields of speech and language research to the fact that speech-data acquisition is an underestimated challenge. Eliciting data that reflect the communicative processes at play in language requires special precautions in devising experimental procedures and a fundamental understanding of both ends of the elicitation process: speaker and recording facilities. The article compiles basic information on each of these requirements and recapitulates some pieces of practical advice, drawing many examples from prosody studies, a field where the thoughtful conception of experimental protocols is especially crucial

The prosodic design of Modern Standard Arabic political monologues

The aim of this study is to describe and understand the prosodic design of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) political monologues. To work towards this aim, we compare two political monologues produced by the same speaker with a broadcast news reading produced by a news announcer. Through comparison of political monologues and broadcast news reading, we highlight linguistic strategies which could be used in any genre of speech, and also what we argue to be persuasive strategies which contribute to the political work of persuasion. We rely on a combination of prosodic, syntactic, and discourse (semantic) evidence to account for linguistic strategies, and on a similar combination of prosodic, syntactic, and discourse (semantics and pragmatics) evidence to account for persuasive strategies, but our primary contribution is highlighting the use of prosody as a persuasive political strategy. A further contribution of this work to the field of knowledge is the elaboration of a set of fine-grained prosodic, syntactic, and discourse structures proposed for broadcast MSA monologues. The prosodic, syntactic, and discourse structures are first labelled independently according to a set of criteria (set out in Chapter 4 Methods). Then, we triangulate the results of labelling the prosodic, syntactic, and discourse structures independently, in Chapters 5-6 leading up to Chapter 7 where the major contribution of this work is highlighted, that is, the use of prosody as a persuasive strategy. The main argument in this work is structured in this gradual way because of the way the process of segmentation is carried out on all three data samples. The process of segmentation starts with identification of abstract forms, and then associates functions to these abstract forms based on detailed explanations of specific linguistic phenomena drawn from the process of triangulation. Therefore, the methodology implemented for broadcast MSA, which can also serve as a methodology for analysing MSA political monologues, is an integral and essential part of the main argument in this thesis

Skilled-based and knowledge-based strategies in Television Interpreting

Television Interpreting and Conference Interpreting have always been regarded as profoundly different in terms of the expected performance and the interpreting strategies utilized. Television interpreting is a multi-faceted activity, requiring a particular mind-set and special communicative skills: television interpreters produce their own text, in an attempt to ensure coherence and convey the same effect that the speaker wants to obtain, with little or no possibility of using décalage due to the pragmatic context. The paper investigates how the flow of discourse is managed by television interpreters, with a special focus on the use of prosody and discourse markers. The analysis is conducted on a corpus of recorded texts, interpreted in simultaneous mode by a professional conference interpreter, working for public television. The typology of the interpreted event is the press conference interview, characterized by a rapid question and answer format. Through this analysis, we shall outline a profile of television interpreters and their interpreting strategies

The sound of radio speech : a comparative analysis of prosody in Swedish and Russian radio programs

Prosody plays an important role in human communication processes. Moreover, the results of researches in intonation are actively used in various fields, e.g. the development of speech production and speech recognition technologies, sound recording software creation, teaching first language to the hearing impaired, speech reconstruction after brain damaging conditions, teaching a foreign language, etc. The research primarily examines phrase-level intonation patterns occurring in radio speech in Swedish and Russian. Within the study, radio represents the context. Radio programs were chosen as a source of data, since the recordings can provide high sound quality, and radio journalists are taught to speak clearly and actively use intonation patterns. The research comprises beginning parts of six programs in each language. Moreover, the programs were grouped into “serious” and “entertaining”. The research is conducted within the post-structural methodology of the research prism combined with the theoretical views of Jakobson. The research is conducted on auditory and instrumental level, and includes the elements of literature review. The auditory level was conducted by the researcher herself, for the instrumental level sound analysis software Praat© was exploited. The key method within the study is visualization. On the auditory level visualization includes textual representation in written form, including a specially developed sign system. On the instrumental level visualization comprises software-created spectrograms and their textual description. The results show some correlations between the topic of the radio program and the prosodic pattern used. In particular, the more emotional speech attributed to the “entertaining” programs exploits a wider pitch change range than the speech of the “serious” programs. However, the results are ambiguous and the issue deserves further studies including a bigger data sampling

Prosody in tourist oral communication. Pausing in city audio guides

Over the last decades, tourist communication has been widely investigated in various languages, involving a variety of printed and Web-based genres and a variety of perspectives. However, as far as oral tourist genres are concerned, there seems to be a gap in academic research, with the published literature including a study by Gavioli (2015) on dialogue interpreting in guided tours in English, a study by Francesconi (2014) on prosody in a BBC travel radio programme, a study by Ravazzolo (2014) on guided tours of botanic parks in French, and a study by Nardi (2012) on museum audio guides in German. Even lesser attention has been paid to the prosodic features of speech in oral tourist genres, and how these are employed to effectively deliver the contents of the tour. This study attempts to contribute to developing this specific area of tourist studies by investigating prosody in city audio guides. More specifically, the study focuses on the use of pauses in city audio guides in Italian and in English. At a theoretical level, the city audio guide is intended here as a form of informative script-based public speaking, whose main function is to provide historical and artistic information on the sites visited by users. On the basis of such theoretical premises, the study unfolds around the assumption that prosody – and pausing in this specific case – plays a key role in effective content delivery and uptake. The study was carried out on 42 audio fragments selected from the scripts of 21 audio guides produced in Italy, the UK and the USA. In each audio fragment, silent pauses were annotated by means of PRAAT, a software for acoustic analysis of speech. The use of pauses between utterances was then investigated in each group of fragments, quantitatively in terms of pause duration variation, and qualitatively in relation to the textual features of the selected portions of scripts. The results show a more frequent use of long pauses and patterned pausing in the British audio fragments with respect to their Italian and American counterparts. Finally, the results are framed within a discussion on best practices in public speaking

Correlation between prosody and pragmatics: case study of discourse markers in French and English

International audienceThis paper investigates the prosodic characteristics of French and English discourse markers according to their pragmatic meaning in context. The study focusses on three French discourse markers (alors ['so'], bon ['well'], and donc ['so']) and three English markers (now, so, and well). Hundreds of occurrences of discourse markers were automatically extracted from French and English speech corpora and manually annotated with pragmatic functions labels. The paper compares the pro-sodic characteristics of discourse markers in different speech styles and in two languages. The first comparison is carried out with respect to two different speech styles in French: spontaneous speech vs. prepared speech. The other comparison of the prosodic characteristics is conducted between two languages, French vs. English, on the prepared speech. Results show that some pragmatic functions of discourse markers bring about specific prosodic behaviour in terms of presence and position of pauses, and their F0 articulation in their immediate context. Moreover, similar pragmatic functions frequently share similar prosodic characteristics, even across languages

VOICE QUALITY AND TV INTERPRETING: A PROPOSAL FOR A GESTALTIC EVALUATION

RESUMEN. La presente tesis doctoral es un estudio de interpretaci\uf3n basado en corpus y consiste en una propuesta de evaluaci\uf3n subjetiva de tipo gest\ue1ltico de la interpretaci\uf3n simult\ue1nea transmitida por televisi\uf3n. El objetivo principal del estudio ha sido la construcci\uf3n de un modelo de evaluaci\uf3n de la calidad basado en la percepci\uf3n gest\ue1ltica del habla y del sonido-imagen percibido a trav\ue9s del medio auiovisual. El modelo de percepci\uf3n gest\ue1ltica adoptado est\ue1 formado por voz-s\uedlaba-prosodia-sentido-contexto-conocimiento (ling\u3cb\uedstico) del mundo, propuesto en \u201cIl volto fonico delle parole\u201d (Albano Leoni 2009), que es una reelaboraci\uf3n del modelo basado en melod\ueda-ritmo-palabras-oraciones, propuesto por Karl B\u3cbhler en su \u201cTeor\ueda del lenguaje\u201d (1934). Se construy\uf3 un corpus tem\ue1tico formado por las interpretaciones en italiano (2) y en espa\uf1ol (2 \u2013 Espa\uf1a y Estados Unidos) de los Debates Presidenciales de Estados Unidos de 2012: el corpus ORenesit (Obama-Romney English espa\uf1ol italiano) se incluye en el corpus de referencia CorIT (Corpus Italiano de Interpretaci\uf3n Televisiva). El modelo de evaluaci\uf3n fue ensayado en una encuesta piloto basada en cuestionario, que incluye 3 extractos v\ueddeo de la interpretaci\uf3n en italiano del Tercer Debate Presidencial de EE.UU. de 2008, entre Obama y McCain, debido a que el corpus ORenesit todav\ueda no se hab\ueda terminado. Uno de los tres v\ueddeos fue modificado por fines experimentales: la voz del int\ue9rprete original se sustituy\uf3 por la de un actor doblador profesional que imit\uf3 en estudio la interpretaci\uf3n original leyendo la transcripci\uf3n y escuchando al orador. Esta decisi\uf3n respond\ueda a dos necesidades, relacionadas sobre todo a la validez ecol\uf3gica del experimento: a) ensayar el efecto de una voz teleg\ue9nica; b) utilizar la expresi\uf3n natural y personal del sujeto. El cuestionario se construy\uf3 sobre categor\uedas extra\ueddas de \u201cLa vive voix\u201d (F\uf3nagy 1983) e \u201cL\u2019Audio-Vision\u201d (Chion 1990). Los datos obtenidos del cuestionario se trataron estad\uedsticamente. Los resultados del estudio cuali-cuantitativo parecen confirmar una percepci\uf3n gest\ue1ltica de la interpretaci\uf3n simult\ue1nea percibida a trav\ue9s del medio audio-visual formada por las componentes: sonido-imagen, s\uedlaba-melod\ueda(-voz-personalidad), palabras-oraciones. Lor resultados parecen poner en duda la efectividad del enfoque cuantitativo para el an\ue1lisis de la percepci\uf3n del habla.ABSTRACT. The present thesis is a corpus-based Interpreting study consisting of a proposal for a gestaltic subjective evaluation of quality in television broadcast simultaneous interpreting. The main objective of the research was to build and test a model of quality assessment based on the gestaltic perception both of speech and the sound-image perceived through the audiovisual medium. The model of gestaltic perception adopted is the one formed by voice-syllable-prosody-sense-context-(linguistic) knowledge of the world, proposed in \u201cIl volto fonico delle parole\u201d (Albano Leoni 2009), which is a re-elaborated version of the model based on melody-rhythm-words-sentences, proposed by Karl B\u3cbhler in his \u201cTheory of Language\u201d (1934). A thematic corpus was built consisting of 2 Italian and 2 Spanish (Spain and United States) interpretations of the 2012 US Presidential Debates: the corpus ORenesit (Obama-Romney English espa\uf1ol italiano) is included in the reference corpus CorIT (Italian Television Interpreting Corpus). The assessment model was tested in a questionnaire-based pilot survey including 3 video excerpts from the Italian interpretations of the 2008 Third Presidential Debate (Obama vs. McCain), since the corpus ORenesit had not been completed yet. One of the 3 video excerpts was modified for experimental purpose: the interpreter\u2019s voice was replaced with the voice of a professional actor and dubber, who imitated in studio the original interpretation while reading the transcript and listening to the speaker. This choice was made to fulfill two needs, mainly related to the ecological validity of the experiment: i) to test the effect of a telegenic voice; and ii) to use a natural and personal expression of the subject. The questionnaire was built on categories extracted from the \u201cLa vive voix\u201d (F\uf3nagy 1983) and \u201cL\u2019Audio-Vision\u201d (Chion 1990). The data obtained were treated statistically. Results of the qualitative and quantitative research seem to confirm a gestaltic perception of interpreting speech received through audio-vision and formed by the following components: sound-image; syllable-melody(-voice-personality), words-sentences. Results seem to raise doubts on the effectiveness of the quantitative approach to the analysis of speech perception

Verification of communicative types in the judicial public space of media discourse in the USA, Kazakhstan and Russia as a psycholinguistic marker of fact-checking

Modern psycholinguistic research and fact-checking actively explore the space of media discourse. However, the representation of the judicial space in the mass media has not been sufficiently studied due to the peculiarities of communicative behavior in the judicial and legal space of the ethno-socius and the attitude to the judiciary. The authors hypothesize that the differences in public behavior in court and the coverage of the work of courts in the American, Kazakh and Russian media are due to the socio-cultural features of the phenomena of judicial and legal communication in public space under the influence of established traditions in such coordinate systems as “person – judicial system”, “openness – closeness of society”, “unity – disunity of society”, “accessibility – stigmatization”, “court – journalistic investigation”, etc. The results confirm the hypothesis of the authors' team, revealing the difference in the perception of the judicial system in the USA, Kazakhstan and Russia, illustrating the "rejection" of the Soviet and post-Soviet stigmatization of the judicial and legal space by the Kazakh society towards democratic norms. The prospects of the study are related to the subsequent development of an automatic system for evaluating speech behavior strategies in court and their coverage in the media as a category of fact-checking