Disentangling lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic influences on German prominence – Evidence from a production study

Samlowski B, Wagner P, Möbius B. Disentangling lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic influences on German prominence – Evidence from a production study. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2012. 2012: 2406-2409.The aim of this paper is to examine effects on syllable prominence exerted by word and phrase boundaries, lexical stress, and sentence focus, and by the interactions between these factors. In a production study, German verb prefixes potentially forming prosodic minimal word pairs were systematically placed in a set of different contexts. Acoustic analyses showed a consistent effect of lexical stress on syllable prominence in both focused and unfocused sentence positions. When the verb was in sentence focus, even unstressed syllables in bisyllabic prefixes changed as a function of lexical stress. Varying sentence stress only had an effect on syllables in lexically stressed prefixes. While no effect of word boundary was found, unbound verb particles preceding phrase boundaries received the highest prominence values. Syllables in lexically stressed prefixes showed greater acoustic similarity with these unbound particles than did syllables in lexically unstressed prefixes

The syllable as a processing unit in speech production: evidence from frequency effects on coarticulation

Samlowski B. The syllable as a processing unit in speech production: evidence from frequency effects on coarticulation. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2016

PromDrum - Exploiting the prosody-gesture link for intuitive, fast and fine-grained prominence annotation

Samlowski B, Wagner P. PromDrum - Exploiting the prosody-gesture link for intuitive, fast and fine-grained prominence annotation. In: Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2016. Boston; 2016

Perception of Suspense in Live Football Commentaries from German and British Perspectives

Kern F, Trouvain J, Samlowski B. Perception of Suspense in Live Football Commentaries from German and British Perspectives. SpeechProsody 2018-8. 2018

Phonetic Detail in German Syllable Pronunciation: Influences of Prosody and Grammar

Samlowski B, Möbius B, Wagner P. Phonetic Detail in German Syllable Pronunciation: Influences of Prosody and Grammar. Frontiers in Psychology. 2014;5:500.This study presents two experiments designed to disentangle various influences on syllable pronunciation. Target syllables were embedded in carrier sentences, read aloud by native German participants, and analyzed in terms of syllable and vowel duration, acoustic prominence, and spectral similarity. Both experiments revealed a complex interaction of different factors, as participants attempted to disambiguate semantically and syntactically ambiguous structures while at the same time distinguishing between important and unimportant information. The first experiment examined German verb prefixes that formed prosodic minimal pairs. Carrier sentences were formulated so as to systematically vary word stress, sentence focus, and the type of syntactic boundary following the prefix. We found clear effects of word stress on duration, prominence, and spectral similarity as well as a small influence of sentence focus on prominence levels of lexically stressed prefixes. While sentence boundaries were marked by particularly high prominence and duration values, hardly any effect was shown for word boundaries. The second experiment compared German function words which were segmentally identical but appeared in different grammatical roles. Here, definite articles were found to be shorter than relative pronouns and still shorter than demonstrative pronouns. As definite articles are also much more common than the other two lexical classes, effects of lemma frequency might also have played a role

Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies

Wagner P, Cwiek A, Samlowski B. Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies. In: Draxler C, Kleber F, eds. Tagungsband der 12. Tagung Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum. München, Deutschland: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; 2016: 211-214

Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies

Wagner P, Cwiek A, Samlowski B. Beat It! Gesture-based Prominence Annotation as a Window to Individual Prosody Processing Strategies. In: Draxler C, Kleber F, eds. Tagungsband der 12. Tagung Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum. München, Deutschland: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; 2016: 211-214

Comparing syllable frequencies in corpora of written and spoken language

Samlowski B, Möbius B, Wagner P. Comparing syllable frequencies in corpora of written and spoken language. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2011. 2011: 637-640.In the study, various German language corpora were compared in order to discover the extent to which syllable frequencies remain stable across different contexts and modalities. Although considerable differences in relative frequency were found among the more common syllables, rank numbers proved to be more robust. Variation across corpora was mostly due to vocabulary characteristics of particular corpus domains rather than to systematic differences between spoken and written language. The results indicate that syllable frequencies in written corpora can be taken as a rough estimate for their frequency in spoken language. Index Terms: syllabary, syllable frequencies, spoken and written language corpor

DiSCo - A speaker and speech recognition evaluation corpus for challenging problems in the broadcast domain

Baum D, Samlowski B, Winkler T, Bardeli R, Schneider D. DiSCo - A speaker and speech recognition evaluation corpus for challenging problems in the broadcast domain. In: GSCL Symposium Sprachtechnologie und EHumanities. 2009: 1-9.Systems for speech and speaker recognition already achieve low error rates when applied to high-quality audiovisual broadcast data, such as news shows recorded in a studio environment. Several evaluation corpora exist for this domain in various languages. However, in actual applications for broadcast data analysis, the data requirements are more complex. There are many data types beyond the planned speech of the news anchorperson. For example, interesting live recordings from prominent politicians are often recorded in an environment with challenging acoustic properties. Discussions typically expose highly spontaneous speech, with different speakers talking at the same time. The performance of standard approaches to speech and speaker recognition typically deteriorates under such data characteristics, and dedicated techniques have to be developed to handle these problems. Corresponding evaluation corpora are needed which reflect the challenging conditions of the actual applications. Currently, no German evaluation corpus is available which covers the required acoustic conditions and diverse language properties. This contribution describes the design of a new speaker and speech recognition evaluation corpus for the broadcast domain, reflecting the typical problems encountered in actual applications