404 research outputs found
Neural representations for modeling variation in speech
Variation in speech is often quantified by comparing phonetic transcriptions
of the same utterance. However, manually transcribing speech is time-consuming
and error prone. As an alternative, therefore, we investigate the extraction of
acoustic embeddings from several self-supervised neural models. We use these
representations to compute word-based pronunciation differences between
non-native and native speakers of English, and between Norwegian dialect
speakers. For comparison with several earlier studies, we evaluate how well
these differences match human perception by comparing them with available human
judgements of similarity. We show that speech representations extracted from a
specific type of neural model (i.e. Transformers) lead to a better match with
human perception than two earlier approaches on the basis of phonetic
transcriptions and MFCC-based acoustic features. We furthermore find that
features from the neural models can generally best be extracted from one of the
middle hidden layers than from the final layer. We also demonstrate that neural
speech representations not only capture segmental differences, but also
intonational and durational differences that cannot adequately be represented
by a set of discrete symbols used in phonetic transcriptions.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Phonetic
“Organically German”?:Changing ideologies of national belonging
This chapter examines variation in the situated meanings of the term Biodeutsche(r), a term which has emerged relatively recently as a way to refer to people who are German by descent (i.e., not of migration background). This analysis shows that use of this term reflects competing discourses about the role of ethnicity in national belonging in Germany. While the origin and many uses of the term challenge the validity of ethnicity as a basis for legitimacy in German society, some of the data suggest that it has also been adopted as a supposedly neutral term to describe a segment of the German population, which supports an ethnonational ideology
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