Acoustics and discourse function of two types of breathing signals

Cwiek A, Wlodarczak M, Heldner M, Wagner P. Acoustics and discourse function of two types of breathing signals. In: Abrahamsen JE, Koreman J, van Dommelen WA, eds. Nordic Prosody: Proceedings of the XIIth Conference, Trondheim 2016. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang Publishing Group; 2017: 83-91.Breathing is fundamental for living and speech, and it has been a subject of linguistic research for years. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in tackling the question of possible communicative functions of breathing (e.g. Rochet-Capellan & Fuchs, 2014; Aare, Włodarczak & Heldner, 2014; Włodarczak & Heldner, 2015; Włodarczak, Heldner, & Edlund, 2015). The present study set out to determine acoustic markedness and communicative functions of pauses accompanied and non-accompanied by breathing. We hypothesised that an articulatory reset occurring in breathing pauses and an articulatory freeze in non-breathing pauses differentiates between the two types. A production experiment was conducted and some evidence in favour of such a phenomenon was found. Namely, in case of non-breathing pauses, we observed more coarticulation evidenced by a more frequent omission of plosive releases. Our findings thus give some evidence in favour of the communicative function of breathing

The effect of accentuation on vowel recognition

This study focuses on the implementation of the phonetic effects of vowel accentuation in automatic speech recognition (ASR). The durational and spectral effects of accentuation are investigated separately by manipulating the transition and observation probabilities in hidden Markov models. We also attempt to implement the undershoot hypothesis [1], which describes spectral reduction as a direct consequence of shortening. Our findings support the widespread belief that the transition probabilities, which indirectly model durational effects, are negligible, and that the distinction between accented and unaccented vowels is determined by the observation probabilities