FINNISH SOUND STRUCTURE. PHONETICS, PHONOLOGY, PHONOTACTICS AND PROSODY

Suomi, Kari; Toivanen, Juhani & Ylitalo, Riikka. Studia humaniora ouluensia 9. Oulu: Oulun yliopisto 2008, 149 s.Elektroninen versio:http://herkules.oulu.fi/isbn978951428984

Perustaajuusjakaumien vertaileminen Praatilla ja R:llä

Pitch analysis tools are used widely in order to measure and to visualize the melodic aspects of speech. The resulting pitch contours can serve various research interests linked with speech prosody, such as intonational phonology, interaction in conversation, emotion analysis, language learning and singing. Due to physiological differences and individual habits, speakers tend to differ in their typical pitch ranges. As a consequence, pitch analysis results are not always easy to interpret and to compare among speakers. In this study, we use the Praat program (Boersma & Weenink 2015) for analyzing pitch in samples of conversational Finnish speech and we use the R statistical programming environment (R Core Team, 2014) for further analysis and visualization. We first describe the general shapes of the speaker-specific pitch distributions and see whether and how the distributions vary between individuals. A bootstrapping method is applied to discover the minimal amount of speech that is necessary in order to reliably determine the pitch mean, median and mode for an individual speaker. The scripts and code written for the Praat program and for the R statistical programming environment are made available under an open license for experimenting with other speech samples. The datasets produced with the Praat script will also be made available for further studies.Peer reviewe

Mylly - The Mill : A new platform for processing speech and text corpora easily and efficiently

Speech and language researchers need to manage and analyze increasing quantities of material. Various tools are available for various stages of the work, but they often require the researcher to use different interfaces and to convert the output from each tool into suitable input for the next one. The Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki) is developing an on-line platform called Mylly for processing speech and language data in a graphical user interface that integrates different tools into a single workflow. Mylly provides tools and computational resources for processing material and for the inspecting the results. The tools plugged into Mylly include a parser, morphological analyzers, generic finite-state technology, and a speech recognizer. Users can upload data and download any intermediate results in the tool chain. Mylly runs on CSC’s Taito cluster and is an instance of the Chipster platform. Access rights to Mylly are given for academic use. The Language Bank of Finland is a collection of corpora, tools and other services maintained by FIN-CLARIN, a consortium of Finnish universities and research organizations coordinated by the University of Helsinki. The technological infrastructure for the Language Bank of Finland is provided by CSC – IT Center for Science.Peer reviewe

Mylly – The Mill : A platform for processing and analyzing your language data

Non peer reviewe

Comparing pitch distributions using Praat and R

Pitch analysis tools are used widely in order to measure and to visualize the melodic aspects of speech. The resulting pitch contours can serve various research interests linked with speech prosody, such as intonational phonology, interaction in conversation, emotion analysis, language learning and singing. Due to physiological differences and individual habits, speakers tend to differ in their typical pitch ranges. As a consequence, pitch analysis results are not always easy to interpret and to compare among speakers. In this study, we use the Praat program (Boersma & Weenink 2015) for analyzing pitch in samples of conversational Finnish speech and we use the R statistical programming environment (R Core Team, 2014) for further analysis and visualization. We first describe the general shapes of the speaker-specific pitch distributions and see whether and how the distributions vary between individuals. A bootstrapping method is applied to discover the minimal amount of speech that is necessary in order to reliably determine the pitch mean, median and mode for an individual speaker. The scripts and code written for the Praat program and for the R statistical programming environment are made available under an open license for experimenting with other speech samples. The datasets produced with the Praat script will also be made available for further studies.Peer reviewe

Aikuisten maahanmuuttajien suomen ääntämisestä

Tässä raportissa selvitetään, millaisia suomen kielen ääntämisvaikeuksia esiintyy seitsemää eri lähtökieltä edustavilla aikuisilla maahanmuuttajilla. Tiedosta on apua suomen ääntämisopetuksessa. Puhujien äidinkielet ovat arabia, kiina, somali, tagalog, thai, venäjä ja vietnam. Raportissa mukana olevat lähtökielet ovat osa Proof-korpusta, jota varten äänitettiin 72:n pääkaupunkiseudulla asuvan 10:tä eri äidinkieltä puhuvan maahanmuuttajan lukupuhuntaa ja keskusteluja. Vastaavat puhenäytteet kerättiin myös kontrolliryhmältä, johon kuului 23 syntyperäistä suomenkielistä. Tässä alustavassa tutkimuksessa kolme tutkijaa kuunteli ääninäytteitä ja teki havaintoja ensin itsenäisesti, lopuksi yhdessä. Puhujien lähtökielten todettiin monin tavoin heijastuvan suomen ääntämiseen, vaikka yksilöllisiä eroja oli runsaasti. Yleisesti ottaen suomen konsonantit olivat helppoja lukuunottamatta /ŋ/:ää ja /h/:n allofoneja. Harvinaisimmat vokaalit ja diftongit olivat monille vaikeita. Lähtökielestä riippumatta äänteiden kestojen tuottaminen oli monelle vaikeaa, mutta ongelmien luonne vaihteli kielten ja puhujien välillä. Erityisesti /pitkät/ konsonantit lyhenivät. Myös äänteiden fonologisen pituuden ja painotuksen riippumattomuus tuotti ongelmia. Erityisesti painottomien tavujen /pitkät/ vokaalit sekä sananalkuiset painolliset /lyhyet/ vokaalit olivat vaikeita. Poikkeamat eivät aina liity selkeästi yksittäisiin äänteisiin tai tavuihin, vaan ääntämisen kokonaisvaltaisempiin piirteisiin. Esimerkiksi monille aasialaisille puhujille oli tyypillistä kauttaaltaan kireä äänenlaatu.Peer reviewe

Donate Speech : Collecting and Sharing a Large-Scale Speech Database for Social Sciences, Humanities and Artificial Intelligence Research and Innovation

The Donate Speech campaign aimed to collect 10 000 hours of ordinary, casual Finnish speech to be used for studying language as well as for developing technology and services that can be readily used in the languages spoken in Finland. In this project, particular attention has been paid to allowing for both academic and commercial use of the material. Even though the ambitious target currently seems to evade us, the Donate Speech campaign has managed to collect an extensive resource of more than 3500 h of Finnish colloquial speech with more than 200 000 speech recordings by roughly 50 000 speakers from all over Finland in just a few months.Peer reviewe