Re-assessing the role of vowel formant dynamics in speaker-dependent information

NWOTheoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Test speaker sample size: speaker modelling for acoustic-phonetic features in conversational speech

NWO276-75-010Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Contextuele invloeden op de productie van /h/ in het Nederlands van Belgisch-Franstalige leerders

The phoneme /h/ is absent in French and its acquisition has been described as being difficult for second language learners of Dutch, a language with /h/ in its phoneme inventory. In this study, several factors were examined that may affect the production of /h/ by Belgian-French learners of Dutch. Specifically, the factors included in this exploratory study were (1) L1-to-L2 transfer, (2) semantic contrastiveness, (3) the monitoring of one’s speech, and (4) educational grade. L1-to-L2 transfer was operationalized as the effect of liaison/elision contexts on /h/-production. The expectation was liaison contexts might transfer and would therefore hinder /h/-production. Semantic contrasts in minimal pairs including an h-initial word would elicit more /h/-productions if that word was contrasted with an empty onset than an onset (oor-hoor) filled by some other consonant (hand-tand). If a speaker pays more attention to his/her speech in an increased-monitoring task, the speaker is expected to produce /h/ more often, and finally it was expected that increased exposure to Dutch would result in more correct productions.In a cross-sectional study, students from the first, third and sixth grades of secondary education (60 in total, aged between 12 years and 19 years old) took part in two reading-aloud tasks, which were assumed to differ in the degree of speech monitoring they require. The first task was a text, with which L1-to-L2 transfer was assessed, and the second a list of minimal pairs containing h-onsets contrasting with either empty or filled onsets. Monitoring was assessed by comparing results between reading tasks.Results showed that increased monitoring positively influenced the numbers of [h]s produced, but that L1-to-L2 transfer of liaison/elision contexts did not occur. A small difference between conditions was found, but in the opposite direction. There was large between-learner variability and no performance increase with amount of exposure from first to sixth grade. Overall, performance left much room for improvement relative to native Dutch speakers and to the learners’ teacher. Further research is needed to better understand the development of French-speaker learners’ production of Dutch /h/.Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Between-speaker variability in segmental F1 dynamics in spontaneous speech

NWOTheoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives

This paper presents and discusses ongoing work aiming at affordable disclosure of real-world spoken word archives in general, and in particular of a collection of recorded interviews with Dutch survivors of World War II concentration camp Buchenwald. Given such collections, the least we want to be able to provide is search at different levels and a flexible way of presenting results. Strategies for automatic annotation based on speech recognition – supporting e.g., within-document search– are outlined and discussed with respect to the Buchenwald interview collection. In addition, usability aspects of the spoken word search are discussed on the basis of our experiences with the online Buchenwald web portal. It is concluded that, although user feedback is generally fairly positive, automatic annotation performance is still far from satisfactory, and requires additional research

Acoustic and speaker variation in Dutch /n/ and /m/ as a function of phonetic context and syllabic position

In forensic speech science, nasals are often reported to be particularly useful in characterizing speakers because of their low within-speaker and high between-speaker variability. However, empirical acoustic data from nasal consonants indicate that there is a somewhat larger role for the oral cavity on nasal consonant acoustics than is generally predicted by acoustic models. For example, in read speech, nasal consonant acoustics show lingual coarticulation that differs by nasal consonant, and syllabic position also seems to affect realizations of nasal consonants within speakers.  In the current exploratory study, the within and between-speaker variation in the most frequent nasals in Standard Dutch, /n/ and /m/, was investigated. Using 3,695 [n] and 3,291 [m] tokens sampled from 54 speakers’ spontaneous telephone utterances, linear mixed-effects modelling of acoustic-phonetic features showed effects of phonetic context that differed by nasal consonant and by syllabic position. A following speaker-classification test using multinomial logistic regression on the acoustic-phonetic features seems to indicate that nasals displaying larger effects of phonetic context also perform slightly better in speaker classification, although differences were minor. This might be caused by between-speaker variation in the degree and timing of lingual coarticulatory gestures. NWO276-75-010Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Language-dependency of /m/ in L1 Dutch and L2 English

NWO276-75-010Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Acoustics of whispered boundary tones: effects of vowel type and tonal crowding

Theoretical and Experimental Linguistic

Individual variation in filled pauses in the native and second language

Individual variation in filled pauses in the native and second language Meike de Boer & Willemijn Heeren Leiden University Centre for Linguistics Hesitation behavior is a relatively unconscious part of language [1], which shows much between-speaker variation [2−4]. Furthermore, individuals are rather consistent in how they hesitate in their native language [2, 5]. This study investigates between-speaker variation in hesitation behavior in the first (L1) and second (L2) language, and within-speaker consistency of filled pauses across languages. In Dutch and English, two fillers are mainly used to express hesitation: uh and um. However, their exact phonetic realization and the ratio between the two are different for these languages [6, 7]. Flege’s Speech Learning Model [8] says that L2 learners only adapt their pronunciation when they perceive a difference between the L1 and L2. Therefore, we expect that Dutch speakers of English more clearly adapt their uh:um proportions than their vowel formants of the uh/um vowels. For other pronunciation features of uh and um, e.g. duration and fundamental frequency (F0), we expect speakers to be consistent across languages [9, 2]. We investigated the speech of 40 Dutch students of University College Utrecht (20 females; 20 males). The speakers were selected from the Longitudinal Corpus of University College English Accents (LUCEA), collected by Orr and Quené [10]. Students from University Colleges have advanced L2 proficiency. Preliminary results show substantial between-speaker variation in the filled pauses uh and um in both Dutch and English. The within-speaker consistency was low where expected: when speaking English, students used the um variant more often than in Dutch. Also, the vowel quality of their filled pauses was pronounced more open and more backwards in English than in Dutch. According to the SLM, this suggests that differences in vowel realization between Dutch and English were sufficiently salient to these speakers, as were the different uh:um ratios. As expected, filled pauses’ durations and F0 remained relatively stable across languages. References [1] Clark, H. H., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2002). Using uh and um in spontaneous speaking. Cognition, 84, 73−111. [2] Braun, A., Rosin, A. (2015). On the speaker-specificity of hesitation markers. Proc. 18th ICPhS Glasgow, 731−736. [3] Hughes, V., Wood, S., & Foulkes, P. (2016). Filled pauses as variables in forensic voice comparison. Int. J. Speech Lang. Law, 23, 99−132. [4] McDougall, K., & Duckworth, M. (2017). Profiling fluency: An analysis of individual variation in disfluencies in adult males. Speech Comm., 95, 16−27. [5] Künzel, H. F. (1997). Some general phonetic and forensic aspects of speaking tempo. For. Linguist., 4, 48−83. [6] De Leeuw, E. (2007). Hesitation markers in English, German, and Dutch. J. Germ. Ling. 19, 85–114. [7] Wieling, M., Grieve, J., Bouma, G., Fruehwald, J., Coleman, J., & Liberman, M. (2016). Variation and change in the use of hesitation markers in Germanic languages. Language Dynamics and Change, 6, 199−234. [8] Flege, J. E. (1995). Second language speech learning: Theory, findings, and problems. In: Strange, W. (Ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in Cross-Language Research. York: York Press, 233−277. [9] Kolly, M. J., Leemann, A., De Mareüil, P. B., & Dellwo, V. (2015). Speaker-idiosyncrasy in pausing behavior: Evidence from a cross-linguistic study. Proc. 18th ICPhS Glasgow, 294−299. [10] Orr, R., & Quené, H. (2017). D-LUCEA: Curation of the UCU Accent Project data. In: Odijk, J., & Van Hessen, A. (Eds.), CLARIN in the Low Countries. London: Ubiquity Press, 177–190. NWOTheoretical and Experimental Linguistic