Temporal markers of prosodic boundaries in children's speech production

It is often thought that the ability to use prosodic features accurately is mastered in early childhood. However, research to date has produced conflicting evidence, notably about the development of children's ability to mark prosodic boundaries. This paper investigates (i) whether, by the age of eight, children use temporal boundary features in their speech in a systematic way, and (ii) to what extent adult listeners are able to interpret their production accurately and unambiguously. The material consists of minimal pairs of utterances: one utterance includes a compound noun, in which there is no prosodic boundary after the first noun, e.g. ‘coffee-cake and tea’, while the other utterance includes simple nouns, separated by a prosodic boundary, e.g. ‘coffee, cake and tea’. Ten eight-year-old children took part, and their productions were rated by 23 adult listeners. Two phonetic exponents of prosodic boundaries were analysed: pause duration and phrase-final lengthening. The results suggest that, at the age of 8, there is considerable variability among children in their ability to mark phrase boundaries of the kind analysed in the experiment, with some children failing to differentiate between the members of the minimal pairs reliably. The differences between the children in their use of boundary features were reflected in the adults' perceptual judgements. Both temporal cues to prosodic boundaries significantly affected the perceptual ratings, with pause being a more salient determinant of ratings than phrase-final lengthening

Speaker Verification with Elicited Speaking-styles in the VeriVox project

Some experiments to take care of within speaker variations in speaker verification has been performed. To get speaker variation, speaking behaviour elicitation software has been developed. It was found that if an ASV system was trained on varied speech, speaker verification on even more varied speech improved significantly. RÉSUMÉ Nous décrivons les expériences réalisées pour prendre en considération les variations intra-locuteur dans un système de vérification automatique du locuteur (ASV). Afin d'obtenir des variations représentatives de la parole d'un locuteur (différentes vitesses d'élocution, états émotionnels particuliers, etc.), nous avons développé un logiciel spécifique que nous décrivons. Notre travail montre qu'entraîner un ASV avec des échantillons de parole enregistrés dans différentes conditions d'élocution améliore de façon significative les performances du système; et ce, même lorsque le système doit faire face à d'autres types de variations que celles vues lors de l'apprentissage. 1

Speaker verification with elicited speaking styles in the VeriVox project

Some experiments have been carried out to study and compensate for within-speaker variations in speaker verification. To induce speaker variation, a speaking behaviour elicitation software package has been developed. A 50-speaker database with voluntary and involuntary speech variation has been recorded using this software. The database has been used for acoustic analysis as well as for automatic speaker verification (ASV) tests. The voluntary speech variations are used to form an enrolment set for the ASV system. This set is called structured training and is compared to neutral training where only normal speech is used. Both sets contain the same number of utterances. It is found that the ASV system improves its performance when testing on a mixed speaking style test without decreasing the performance of the tests with normal speech

Within-Speaker Variability Due to Speaking Manners

Some preliminary investigations of within-speaker variations due to voluntary and induced speaking manners have been performed. The ultimate aim of the investigations was to suggest methods to take care of within-speaker variations in automatic speaker verification. Special software was developed to systematically elicit different types of voluntary and involuntary speech variations that might realistically occur in every-day situations. A database containing speech from 50 Swedish male speakers was collected using this software. Acoustic analyses have been performed on and the results compared between voluntary and involuntary speech variations. The acoustic parameters that have been studied included segment durations, formant frequencies at vowel midpoints, fundamental frequency and overall amplitude and amplitude in frequency bands. 1. INTRODUCTION The present paper presents some methods and data attained in the ESPRIT-VeriVox project. The ultimate aim of the VeriVox project was t..