Great Expectations - Introspective vs. Perceptual Prominence Ratings and their Acoustic Correlates

Wagner P. Great Expectations - Introspective vs. Perceptual Prominence Ratings and their Acoustic Correlates. In: Interspeech 2005. 2005: 2381-2384.In order to gain knowledge about the interaction between top-down expectations of listeners concerning prosodic prominence and its acoustic correlates, two exploratory empirical studies were carried out. First, native and non-native subjects rated prominences of speech read at normal and very fast - prosodically very different - speech. Later, these ratings were compared with introspective prominence ratings of different listeners. First results indicate a major influence of the introspection on prominence ratings, especially if acoustic cues are difficult to interpret, as it is the case in very fast speech. Compared to native subjects, non-natives rely less on their introspection and more on the acoustics

Two Sides of the Same Coin? Investigating Iambic and Trochaic Timing and Prominence in German Poetry.

Wagner P. Two Sides of the Same Coin? Investigating Iambic and Trochaic Timing and Prominence in German Poetry. In: Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010. 2010: P1.47.This paper examines the acoustic and perceptual properties of iambic vs. trochaic meter in a large corpus of read German poetry. Psychoacoustic evidence of metrical grouping is not straightforwardly applicable to speech, due to the complex interaction of the involved acoustic parameters in prominence expression. It is possible that grouping effects in (poetic) speech are merely an artifact of listeners’ expectations based on rhythmic alternations previously heard. Empirical findings show small but significant duration differences between iambic and trochaic feet. Furthermore, it was found that stressed and unstressed syllables are produced with a stable phase relationship of 3:2, independent of meter. Experience in poetry reading plays a role in production style. On the level of prosodic prominence, only subtle differences can be traced. Our findings do not provide convincing evidence for meter specific prosodic shapes and are compatible with an affordance based dynamic view of rhythmic structure. Index Terms: grouping, rhythm, prominence, mete

No Time to Lose? Time Shrinking Effects enhance the Impression of Rhythmic "Isochrony" and Fast Speech Rate

Wagner P, Windmann A. No Time to Lose? Time Shrinking Effects enhance the Impression of Rhythmic "Isochrony" and Fast Speech Rate. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2009. 2009: 1523-1526.Time Shrinking denotes the psychoacoustic shrinking effect of a short interval on one or several subsequent longer intervals. Its effectiveness in the domain of speech perception has so far not been examined. Two perception experiments clearly suggest the influence of relative duration patterns triggering time shrinking on the perception of tempo and rhythmical isochrony or rather ”evenness”. A comparison between the experimental data and duration patterns across various languages suggest a strong influence of time shrinking on the impression of isochrony in speech and perceptual speech rate. Our results thus emphasize the necessity of taking into account relative timing within rhythmical domains such as feet, phrases or narrow rhythm units as a complementary perspective to popular global rhythm variability metrics. Index Terms: prosody, perception, rhythm, timing, temp

The influence of top-down expectations on the perception of syllable prominence

Arnold D, Wagner P. The influence of top-down expectations on the perception of syllable prominence. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ISCA Workshop on Experimental Linguistics (ExLing 2008). 2008: 25-28.In our study we use the experimental framework of priming to manipulate our subjects‘ expectations of syllable prominence in sentences with a well-defined syntactic and phonological structure. It shows that it is possible to prime prominence patterns and that priming leads to significant differences in the judgment of syllable promi- nence. Key words: Top-Down, Priming, Syllable Prominence, Perceptio

Explaining the academic achievement gap of immigrant youth in Austria

Informed by a risk and resilience developmental perspective, this study tests individual, family and school level processes as potential explanations of the immigrant academic achievement gap. In total, 1155 adolescents (48% girls; 20% immigrants, 11–14 years) attending grades 5, 6, 7 and 8 in secondary schools participated. Controlling for gender, age, citizenship, country of birth, SES, and school type, immigrant adolescents had lower levels of academic achievement compared to non-immigrants. High levels of scholastic anxiety, low levels of scholastic self-concept, high levels of parental performance expectations, and high school performance expectations helped to explain these associations. In the full model, only scholastic anxiety and self-concept remained significant mediators. Recommendations are to implement positive and growth-oriented student-centred teaching styles to reduce the immigrant academic achievement gap.publishedVersio

A point-based event phonology for the phonetics-phonology interface

Wagner P, Kühnlein P. A point-based event phonology for the phonetics-phonology interface. In: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Formal Grammar, Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and Categorial Grammar. Saarbrücken, Germany; 1998: 1-10.Recent rethinking of the Phonetics/Phonology-Interface has come to drop the old notion of a syntactic relationship between both research domains and replaced it by a semantic one. However, it remained relatively unclear how this relationship ought to look like. Progress in diagrammatic reasoning provides a fruitful approach towards a mutually constraining interface description. But to utilise this tool we first have to argue that it is reasonable to suppose a common ontology of a certain variant for both fiels of research. This is so, bacause the heterogenous logics-approach attempted here relies on the sharing of models

Relationships between rhythm and speech rate

Dellwo V, Wagner P. Relationships between rhythm and speech rate. Presented at the 15th International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona.The interaction between speech rate and rhythm is a topic that has hardly been studied in respective models of language rhythm though its potential significance has recently been addressed: since both of these prosodic parameters are to a great extent dependent on speech timing they are suspected to interact to a great degree. The present research studies the influence of speech rate on the vocalic and intervocalic measures %V and ..

An Evaluation of Manual and Semi-Automatic Laughter Annotation

Ludusan B, Wagner P. An Evaluation of Manual and Semi-Automatic Laughter Annotation. In: Proceedings of Interspeech 2020. ISCA; 2020: 621-625.With laughter research seeing a development in recent years, there is also an increased need in materials having laughter annotations. We examine in this study how one can leverage existing spontaneous speech resources to this goal. We first analyze the process of manual laughter annotation in corpora, by establishing two important parameters of the process: the amount of time required and its inter-rater reliability. Next, we propose a novel semi-automatic tool for laughter annotation, based on a signal-based representation of speech rhythm. We test both annotation approaches on the same recordings, containing German dyadic spontaneous interactions, and employing a larger pool of annotators than previously done. We then compare and discuss the obtained results based on the two aforementioned parameters, highlighting the benefits and costs associated to each approach

No laughing matter. An investigation into the acoustic cues marking the use of laughter

Ludusan B, Wagner P. No laughing matter. An investigation into the acoustic cues marking the use of laughter. In: Proceedings of ICPhS. 2019.Laughter is a paralinguistic phenomenon widely used in human communication. Previous studies on laughter have mainly looked at its acoustic realization and its functions, leaving the context in which laughter occurs relatively under-studied. We intend to partially fill this gap by conducting an investigation into the acoustic cues that mark the use of laughter. We focus on the syllables preceding laughter and we explore several relevant spectral features. The results obtained on an American English corpus of conversational speech show anticipatory effects on the syllable immediately preceding laughter: a higher F1, a higher spectral center of gravity and a greater spectral standard deviation. We discuss these findings in terms of the individual variation present in laughter