Stress and phonemic length in the perception of Slovak vowels

We investigate the perception of phonemic vowel quantity contrast and its relation to word stress and vowel quality in Slovak, and fill the gap of missing experimental perception data for this language. We observe that both prosodically-driven undershoot of unstressed vowels and the functional load affect the perception of quantity contrast. Vowel quality plays some role in quantity identification for high vowels (/u/ and unstressed /i/) but Slovak seems to retain a robust quantity contrast for all examined vowel qualities

On the phonetic status of syllabic consonants

AbstractThis paper investigates the phonetic correlates of syllable structure, focusing on syllabic consonants. Cross-linguistically, syllables containing consonantal nuclei are often subject to a number of restrictions compared to their vocalic counterparts. However, some languages, like Slovak, allow relatively freely distributed syllabic liquids. Phonetic studies of syllable structure have shown that the vowel provides the basis for the articulatory coordination relationships within a syllable, and consonant–vowel timing patterns have been identified as a primary phonetic correlate of syllable structure. However, how coordination relationships within a syllable are organized when a consonant occupies the nucleus is largely unknown. We investigate whether in Slovak, syllabic consonants change their consonantal kinematics to approach a more vowel-like articulation and whether vowel-less syllables differ in their articulatory timing characteristics from canonical syllables containing vowels. Our results show that a consonant does not change to be more like a vowel in its articulatory dynamics when occupying the nucleus position. However, we find consistent effects in articulatory timing in that consonantal syllables show less overlap on a variety of measures compared to vocalic syllables. We argue that the typological possibility for syllabic consonants may be related to the general consonant timing pattern of a language.</jats:p

Effects of lexical stress and speech rate on the quantity and quality of Slovak vowels

We investigate the relationship between vowel quantity and the utilization of formant space in Slovak, and how prosodic variation in speech rate and lexical stress marking affects this relationship. Slovak presents a common five-vowel system with full phonemic quantity contrast for all vowels in all positions. We found that 1) phonemic quantity contrast in Slovak is salient and minimally affected by lexical stress and speech rate, and 2) shortening due to phonemic contrast and destressing but not due to speech rate, are accompanied by vowel space contraction. We compare the results to the geographically neighboring la nguages Czech and Hungarian that display similar prosodic characteristics to Slovak

Prosodic conditioning of pre-sonorant voicing

The present study investigates the influence of prosodic structure on pre-sonorant voicing in Slovak. Our results demonstrate that prosodic boundaries as well as accent interact in a meaningful way with voicing assimilation. If a major boundary intervenes, the role of accent is eliminated, while in other contexts the presence of contrastive focus induces less voicing. A novel finding of the study is that sonorant consonants and vowels differ considerably in this assimilation process. It is also demonstrated that pre-sonorant voicing in Slovak is categorical but optional and is close to being completely neutralizing

Kinematic signatures of prosody in Lombard speech

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Accentual phrase in languages with fixed word stress: a study on Hungarian and Slovak

In languages with fixed stress towards the left or right edge of the word, stress is often used for delimiting one edge of a prosodic phrase, while the other edge is marked by a boundary tone. In languages in which sequences between two accents form an accentual phrase (AP), these APs often have a consistent pattern of their own. Thus, they are supposed to deviate from the overall declination pattern of an IP. This assumption was used to investigate whether Hungarian and Slovak make use of APs

Accelerating Face Anti-Spoofing Algorithms

Tato práce se specializuje na akceleraci algoritmu z oblasti obličejově zaměřených anti-spoofing algoritmů s využitím grafického hardware jakožto platformy pro paralelní zpracování dat. Jako framework je použita technologie OpenCL která umožňuje použití od výkoných stolních počítačů po přenosná zařízení, od různých akcelerátorů jako grafické čipy, či ASIC až po procesory typu x86 bez vazby na konkrétního výrobce či operační systém. Autor předkládá čtenáři rozbor a akcelerovanou implementaci široce používaného algoritmu a dopadu urychlení výpočtu.This thesis is specializes on algorithm acceleration from the field of face-based anti-spoofing. Graphics hardware is used as platform for data-parallel processing. As framework, the OpenCL is used. It allows execution on devices such as powerful desktop computers or hand-held devices as well as usage of different kind of processing units such as GPU, ASIC or CPU without any bound to hardware vendor or operating system. Author presents to reader analysis and accelerated implementation of widely used algorithm and impact of such improvement in execution time.