A Welsh speech database: preliminary results.

A speech database for Welsh was recorded in a studio from read text by a few speakers. The purpose is to investigate the acoustic characteristics of Welsh speech sounds and prosody. It can also serve as a resource for future work in speech synthesis and recognition. The speech is labelled by hand at the acoustic phonetic level, and labelled semi-automatically at the phoneme, syllable, and word levels. Statistical analysis of the database resolves some long-standing questions in the phonetics of Welsh stress, and yields more data on Welsh speech sounds. The overall procedure could be useful for work on other minority languages where very little basic acoustic phonetic research has yet been done

The question of randomness in English foot timing: a control experiment

Isochrony has been considered only in terms of stressed syllables. However, it may also be a random property of unstressed syllables, and a control experiment was deemed necessary. A handtranscribed database of 98 sentences, each produced by three speakers, formed the input to an algorithm calculating durations of feet, number of syllables per foot, and mean syllable duration within each foot. In each output dataset, feet were based on one of the following criteria: stressed, tense, unreduced, random, or arbitrary syllables (the latter based on ordinal numbers of syllables within the utterance). Calculations were made of the correlations between foot duration and number of syllables per foot, and between mean syllable duration and number of syllables per foot. The 'foot compression effect' was shown to be nonrandom, and due to linguistic rather than arbitrary factors. A detailed examination of actual syllable durations was then carried out. The main determinants of syllable duration were the number of constituent segments, and syllable status in terms of target/nontarget. A small but significant syllable shortening effect was also found, dependent on the number of syllables in the foot, which was linguistic rather than random

Welsh letter-to-sound rules: rewrite rules and two-level rules compared

In a text-to-speech synthesis system, input words not found in the system's lexicon are passed to letter-to-sound rules, which derive the word's pronunciation. In Welsh, the letter-to-sound rules must be applied in three passes; firstly, to add epenthetic vowels, secondly, to determine stress and vowel location, and thirdly, to perform grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. To begin with, all these letter-to-sound rules were written in the form of context-sensitive rewrite rules, and were evaluated, giving a 96% success rate. The rules for the second pass were then rewritten in the form of two-level rules, using the PCKIMMO software package. The output was identical to that produced by the second block of rewrite rules. The two-level formalism had advantages in simplifying rules. However, there were difficulties due to the need to force the rules to operate in a deterministic fashion. In a practical text-to-speech system, the rewrite rule formalism would be favoured, despite the greater number of rules and their greater clumsiness, since the critical ordering of rewrite rules easily introduces the necessary determinism

Levels of Annotation for a Welsh Speech Database for Phonetic Research

A Welsh speech database intended for use in phonetic research requires careful annotation at several linguistic levels. The initial stage is that of labelling at the acoustic phonetic level, where the closure, burst and aspiration phases of a stop consonant are all separately labelled. The next is the phonemic stage, which can be derived from the former in most cases. Next is the syllabic stage, where each syllable is labelled in terms of its word status and in terms of lexical stress. The final stage is the lexical stage, where each word is labelled according to its word class. A statistical package can then be run over this data to yield information on the acoustic characteristics of Welsh speech sounds, and also about the nature of lexical stress in Welsh. In addition, it is hoped to derive rules for intonation patterns for use in an existing Welsh text-to-speech synthesiser

Text-to-speech synthesis for Welsh and Welsh English.

This work represents the first known attempt to develop a text-to-speech synthesiser for Welsh. A list of pseudo-Welsh nonsense words was generated, allowing for certain difficulties particular to Welsh. Diphones were derived semi-manually from the recorded nonsense words. The first known phonemic lexicon for Welsh was derived from an electronic corpus. Letter-to-sound rules for Welsh were written, differentiating between the vocalic and consonantal realisations of two graphemes, and assigning lexical stress. An existing English text-to-speech synthesis system was adapted for Welsh. Some simple duration and F0 rules were written that gave pleasing results with the minimum of rules. The resulting system can be used for Welsh or for English spoken with a recognisable Welsh accent

Stress in modern Welsh

The first chapter reviews twentieth- century work on stress, considering stress from several points of view: as intensity, pitch and rhythm. The weaknesses of some approaches are pointed out. Some past work on isochrony is summarised and the metrical theory of stress introduced. The problem presented by stress in Welsh is introduced informally. The second chapter describes a series of measurements and experiments carried out to investigate stress in Welsh. Acoustic measurements are made of Fo, intensity, duration, and lengths of rhythmic feet. It is concluded that stress in Welsh is determined by rhythm rather than inherent acoustic cues. Statistical anal ysis of further measurements of feet reveal s the effects of syllabification and also supports the previous findings. Perceptual experiments using native speaker judgements of resynthesised speech are presented and analysed; it is concluded that Welsh stress is linked with rhythm and with consonantal length (the consonant after a stressed vowel being longer than one after an unstressed vowel), while it has no direct link with pitch- prominence as such. The third chapter outl ines a theoretical framework based on the 'metrical' theory of stress, and proceeds to apply it to Welsh . This modified framework makes use of Selkirk's 'prosodic units', but differs from the usual forms of the theory by also taking account of the semantic weight of words in the utterance context. It is agreed that this makes for a more explanatory theory, and some puzzles of English intonation are shown to be described more simply using such a theory. The patterns of intonation in Welsh are also described in this framework. The fourth chapter discusses the implications posed by the experimental results for the general theory of stress. Reference is made to some research in the psychology of stress perception, and evidence is also presented from the historical development of Welsh from ancient British times, and also from the Welsh bardic rules of versification. It is argued that Welsh has a unique contribution to make to our understanding of the nature of and possible forms taken by stress, and the conclusion is that stress in any language, and more particularly in English, may not be as straightforward a matter as has been hitherto assumed

A keyvowel approach to the synthesis of regional accents of English.

Most English text-to-speech synthesisers offer one of only two accents: General American or RP. Developing a new accent is laborious, since it is not possible to choose one accent as a base form and systematically translate to others. We use the approach of Wells ([1]), categorising vowels in terms of abstract keywords that encode classes of words. Thus it is unnecessary to use a phonemic transcription in either the development or the execution of a synthesiser. The “keyvowel” system can be used throughout the synthesis system, avoiding the need to make accent-specific changes manually. The same linguistic resources can be re-used for each new accent. More fundamentally, the keyvowel system functions as a meta-accent that subsumes vowel-related information in all accents of English

Does the role of personal academic tutor have an impact on staff wellbeing?

This paper explores the experience of acting as a personal academic tutor (PAT) at a medium sized University in the West Midlands. The researchers aimed to establish the robustness of the PAT system, with a focus on wellbeing of both staff and students. This research took place within the context of growing concerns for student and staff wellbeing. A thematic analysis (n) 26 full time employees with at least 1-year PAT experience identified 3 key themes; self, others/ systems and resilience. Subordinate themes within each include; Burden, self as context, mental health, resilience, boundaries, deployment, experience systems and support. The researchers then re-examined the thematic data through the lens of Transactional Analysis. Karpmans’ (1968, 40-42) drama triangle became evident in the development within the PAT student relationship and its incumbent complexity. The effects on staff wellbeing were discussed and found to have both positive and negative consequences. As part of future PAT training the researchers would suggest using the drama triangle for staff to reflect honestly on current positions in their PAT relationships. This should present possibilities in each relationship of movement towards the winner's triangle and reduce the emotional burden of the PAT while increasing student self-efficacy

General practice palliative care: Patient and carer expectations, advance care plans and place of death-a systematic review

Background: With an increasing ageing population in most countries, the role of general practitioners (GPs) and general practice nurses (GPNs) in providing optimal end of life (EoL) care is increasingly important. Objective: To explore: (1) patient and carer expectations of the role of GPs and GPNs at EoL; (2) GPs’ and GPNs’ contribution to advance care planning (ACP) and (3) if primary care involvement allows people to die in the place of preference. Method: Systematic literature review. Data sources: Papers from 2000 to 2017 were sought from Medline, Psychinfo, Embase, Joanna Briggs Institute and Cochrane databases. Results: From 6209 journal articles, 51 papers were relevant. Patients and carers expect their GPs to be competent in all aspects of palliative care. They valued easy access to their GP, a multidisciplinary approach to care and well-coordinated and informed care. They also wanted their care team to communicate openly, honestly and empathically, particularly as the patient deteriorated. ACP and the involvement of GPs were important factors which contributed to patients being cared for and dying in their preferred place. There was no reference to GPNs in any paper identified. Conclusions: Patients and carers prefer a holistic approach to care. This review shows that GPs have an important role in ACP and that their involvement facilitates dying in the place of preference. Proactive identification of people approaching EoL is likely to improve all aspects of care, including planning and communicating about EoL. More work outlining the role of GPNs in end of life care is required