Acomodación fonética durante las interacciones conversacionales: una visión general

During conversational interactions such as tutoring, instruction-giving tasks, verbal negotiations, or just talking with friends, interlocutors’ behaviors experience a series of changes due to the characteristics of their counterpart and to the interaction itself. These changes are pervasively present in every social interaction, and most of them occur in the sounds and rhythms of our speech, which is known as acoustic-prosodic accommodation, or simply phonetic accommodation. The consequences, linguistic and social constraints, and underlying cognitive mechanisms of phonetic accommodation have been studied for at least 50 years, due to the importance of the phenomenon to several disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Based on the analysis and synthesis of the existing empirical research literature, in this paper we present a structured and comprehensive review of the qualities, functions, onto- and phylogenetic development, and modalities of phonetic accommodation.Durante las interacciones conversacionales como dar una tutoría, dar instrucciones, las negociaciones verbales, o simplemente hablar con amigos, los comportamientos de las personas experimentan una serie de cambios debido a las características de su interlocutor y a la interacción en sí. Estos cambios están presentes en cada interacción social, y la mayoría de ellos ocurre en los sonidos y ritmos del habla, lo cual se conoce como acomodación acústico-prosódica, o simplemente acomodación fonética. Las consecuencias, las limitaciones lingüísticas y sociales, y los mecanismos cognitivos subyacentes a la acomodación fonética se han estudiado durante al menos 50 años, debido a la importancia del fenómeno para varias disciplinas como la lingüística, la psicología, y la sociología. A partir del análisis y síntesis de la literatura de investigación empírica existente, en este artículo presentamos una revisión estructurada y exhaustiva de las cualidades, funciones, desarrollo onto- y filogenético, y modalidades de la acomodación fonética

Exploring Forensic Accent Recognition using the Y-ACCDIST System

Forensic speech scientists may sometimes be faced with the task of extracting information about an unknown speaker in a recording. It is proposed here that accent recognition technology could assist analysts in such cases and we begin to explore the Y-ACCDIST system’s potential for this purpose. Research on Y-ACCDIST so far has largely focussed on its ability to distinguish between varieties which are much more similar to one another than previous automatic accent recognition research [1]. The experiments presented here build on this and challenge YACCDIST in other ways relevant to forensic applications: spontaneous speech data and degraded dat

Automatic detection of hyperarticulated speech

Hyperarticulation is a speech adaptation that consists of adopting a clearer form of speech in an attempt to improve recognition levels. However, it has the opposite effect when talking to ASR systems, as they are not trained with such kind of speech. We present approaches for automatic detection of hyperarticulation, which can be used to improve the performance of spoken dialog systems. We performed experiments on Let’s Go data, using multiple feature sets and two classification approaches. Many relevant features are speaker dependent. Thus, we used the first turn in each dialog as the reference for the speaker, since it is typically not hyperarticulated. Our best results were above 80 % accuracy, which represents an improvement of at least 11.6 % points over previously obtained results on similar data. We also assessed the classifiers’ performance in scenarios where hyperarticulation is rare, achieving around 98 % accuracy using different confidence thresholds.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

The morphological integration of loanwords into Modern Standard Arabic

This thesis explores the morphological integration of Standard Average European (SAE) words into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). The topic constitutes a challenge insofar as SAE and MSA are typologically very different, and integration of words from SAE into MSA should therefore be generally difficult. Loanwords were selected from a collection of contemporary short stories and filtered through a Modern Standard Arabic dictionary of words with non-Semitic origin. This was followed by a morphological analysis and categorization of the loanwords. The loanwords can be divided into two groups. Words in the first group do not fit into the so called root and pattern system of MSA, i.e. the configuration where a verbal root serves as the basis for derivations and inflections produced via internal vowel or consonant alternations. However, words in this group can take Arabic suffixes. The latter group can be subdivided into (i) loanwords which can be linked to formal roots as evident from their broken (= root internal) plural pattern, (ii) proper verbal roots or (iii) a combination of these. This classification enables us to create a scale of morphological integration. It is shown that suffixing (as in group 1) is not a viable strategy for integrating loanwords into a language exhibiting the root and pattern-system, such as MSA. Of special interest is the border between loanwords consisting of unintegrated solid stem words on one side, and on the other, loanwords that can be linked to a root

The perceptual significance of high-frequency energy in the human voice

While human vocalizations generate acoustical energy at frequencies up to (and beyond) 20 kHz, the energy at frequencies above about 5 kHz has traditionally been neglected in speech perception research. The intent of this paper is to review (1) the historical reasons for this research trend and (2) the work that continues to elucidate the perceptual significance of high-frequency energy (HFE) in speech and singing. The historical and physical factors reveal that, while HFE was believed to be unnecessary and/or impractical for applications of interest, it was never shown to be perceptually insignificant. Rather, the main causes for focus on low-frequency energy appear to be because the low-frequency portion of the speech spectrum was seen to be sufficient (from a perceptual standpoint), or the difficulty of HFE research was too great to be justifiable (from a technological standpoint). The advancement of technology continues to overcome concerns stemming from the latter reason. Likewise, advances in our understanding of the perceptual effects of HFE now cast doubt on the first cause. Emerging evidence indicates that HFE plays a more significant role than previously believed, and should thus be considered in speech and voice perception research, especially in research involving children and the hearing impaired

The role of vowel hyperarticulation in clear speech to foreigners and infants

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonResearch on clear speech has shown that the type of clear speech produced can vary depending on the speaker, the listener and the medium. Although prior research has suggested that clear speech is more intelligible than conversational speech for normal-hearing listeners in noisy environments, it is not known which acoustic features of clear speech are the most responsible for enhanced intelligibility and comprehension. This thesis focused on investigating the acoustic characteristics that are produced in clear speech to foreigners and infants. Its aim was to assess the utility of these features in enhancing speech intelligibility and comprehension. The results of Experiment 1 showed that native speakers produced exaggerated vowel space in natural interactions with foreign-accented listeners compared to native-accented listeners. Results of Experiment 2 indicated that native speakers exaggerated vowel space and pitch to infants compared to clear read speech. Experiments 3 and 4 focused on speech perception and used transcription and clarity rating tasks. Experiment 3 contained speech directed at foreigners and showed that speech to foreign-accented speakers was rated clearer than speech to native-accented speakers. Experiment 4 contained speech directed at infants and showed that native speakers rated infant-directed speech as clearer than clear read speech. In the fifth and final experiment, naturally elicited clear speech towards foreign-accented interlocutors was used in speech comprehension tasks for native and non-native listeners with varying proficiency of English. It was revealed that speech with expanded vowel space improved listeners’ comprehension of speech in quiet and noise conditions. Results are discussed in terms of the Lindblom’s (1990) theory of Hyper and Hypoarticulation, an influential framework of speech production and perception.Brunel University Isambard Research Scholarshi