Comparing word and syllable prominence rated by naïve listeners

Prominence has been widely studied on the word level and the syllable level. An extensive study comparing the two approaches is missing in the literature. This study investigates how word and syllable prominence relate to each other in German. We find that perceptual ratings based on the word level are more extreme than those based on the syllable level. The correlations between word prominence and acoustic features are greater than the correlations between syllable prominence and acoustic features

Obtaining prominence judgments from naïve listeners – Influence of rating scales, linguistic levels and normalisation

A frequently replicated finding is that higher frequency words tend to be shorter and contain more strongly reduced vowels. However, little is known about potential differences in the articulatory gestures for high vs. low frequency words. The present study made use of electromagnetic articulography to investigate the production of two German vowels, [i] and [a], embedded in high and low frequency words. We found that word frequency differently affected the production of [i] and [a] at the temporal as well as the gestural level. Higher frequency of use predicted greater acoustic durations for long vowels; reduced durations for short vowels; articulatory trajectories with greater tongue height for [i] and more pronounced downward articulatory trajectories for [a]. These results show that the phonological contrast between short and long vowels is learned better with experience, and challenge both the Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and current theories of German phonology

The effect of priming on the correlations between prominence ratings and acoustic features

Arnold D, Wagner P, Möbius B. The effect of priming on the correlations between prominence ratings and acoustic features. In: Prosodic Prominence: Perceptual and Automatic Identification (Speech Prosody 2010 Workshop). 2010: W1.02.In previous research we showed that the priming paradigm can be used to significantly alter the prominence ratings of subjects. In that study we only looked at the changes in the subjects’ ratings. In the present study, we analyzed the acoustic parameters of the stimuli used in the priming study and investigated the correlation between prominence ratings and acoustic parameters. The results show that priming has a significant effect on these correlations. The contribution of acoustic features on perceived prominence was found to depend on the prominence pattern. If a dominantly prominent syllable is present in a given utterance, f0 and intensity contribute most to the perceived prominence, while duration contributes most when no syllable is dominantly prominent. Index Terms: syllable, prominence, priming, acoustic correlate

Dynamic Formant Trajectories in German Read Speech : Impact of Predictability and Prominence

Phonetic structures expand temporally and spectrally when they are difficult to predict from their context. To some extent, effects of predictability are modulated by prosodic structure. So far, studies on the impact of contextual predictability and prosody on phonetic structures have neglected the dynamic nature of the speech signal. This study investigates the impact of predictability and prominence on the dynamic structure of the first and second formants of German vowels. We expect to find differences in the formant movements between vowels standing in different predictability contexts and a modulation of this effect by prominence. First and second formant values are extracted from a large German corpus. Formant trajectories of peripheral vowels are modeled using generalized additive mixed models, which estimate nonlinear regressions between a dependent variable and predictors. Contextual predictability is measured as biphone and triphone surprisal based on a statistical German language model. We test for the effects of the information-theoretic measures surprisal and word frequency, as well as prominence, on formant movement, while controlling for vowel phonemes and duration. Primary lexical stress and vowel phonemes are significant predictors of first and second formant trajectory shape. We replicate previous findings that vowels are more dispersed in stressed syllables than in unstressed syllables. The interaction of stress and surprisal explains formant movement: unstressed vowels show more variability in their formant trajectory shape at different surprisal levels than stressed vowels. This work shows that effects of contextual predictability on fine phonetic detail can be observed not only in pointwise measures but also in dynamic features of phonetic segments

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

Integrating Form and Meaning: A Multi-Task Learning Model for Acoustic Word Embeddings

Models of acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) learn to map variable-length spoken word segments onto fixed-dimensionality vector representations such that different acoustic exemplars of the same word are projected nearby in the embedding space. In addition to their speech technology applications, AWE models have been shown to predict human performance on a variety of auditory lexical processing tasks. Current AWE models are based on neural networks and trained in a bottom-up approach that integrates acoustic cues to build up a word representation given an acoustic or symbolic supervision signal. Therefore, these models do not leverage or capture high-level lexical knowledge during the learning process. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning model that incorporates top-down lexical knowledge into the training procedure of AWEs. Our model learns a mapping between the acoustic input and a lexical representation that encodes high-level information such as word semantics in addition to bottom-up form-based supervision. We experiment with three languages and demonstrate that incorporating lexical knowledge improves the embedding space discriminability and encourages the model to better separate lexical categories.Comment: Accepted in INTERSPEECH 202