Niebuhr, Oliver

University of Southern Denmark Research Output

Syddansk Universitet
INSPECT: Innovating Speech Elicitation Techniques
Niebuhr, Oliver
Publication date:
2015
Citation for pulished version (APA):
Niebuhr, O. (2015). INSPECT: Innovating Speech Elicitation Techniques. Paper presented at 14th International
Pragmatics Conference, Antwerpen, Belgium.
General rights
Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners
and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.
            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.
            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain
            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?
Take down policy
If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately
and investigate your claim.
Download date: 19. Apr. 2017
INSPECT: Innovating Speech Elicitation Techniques 
Oliver Niebuhr 
Institute of Design and Communication, Innovation Research Cluster Alsion, University of 
Southern Denmark, Sønderborg, Denmark 
olni@sdu.dk 
Corpora of spontaneous monologues and dialogues are of increasing importance in phonetic 
research. However, the task of describing and understanding speech communication also 
places certain requirements on the acoustic quality and experimental control of speech signals 
and moreover involves a number of instrumental approaches. Thus, as Xu (2010:329) puts it, 
"lab speech is indispensable in our quest to understand the underlying mechanisms of human 
language [...] although spontaneous speech is rich in various patterns, and so is useful for 
many purposes, the difficulty in recognizing and controlling the contributing factors makes it 
less likely than lab speech to lead to true insights about the nature of human speech". 
 Despite this inevitable fact, we know surprisingly little about the social, environ-
mental, and task-specific factors that shape speech production inside the laboratory, apart 
from the fact that read speech differs in many respects from spontaneous speech (e.g,., 
Mixdorff & Pfitzinger, 2005; Dellwo et al., 2015). In the recent words of Wagner et al. 
(2015:1): "we need a much better understanding of the extent to which our methods and our 
ways of collecting speech data influence our results". INSPECT is a research initiative that 
was started in 2013 and takes up the long neglected challenge of investigating if and how all 
the various aspects and elements of recordings inside the laboratory affect speech production 
in general and prosodic constructions in particular. On this basis, INSPECT pursues three 
long-term goals: First, to understand the differences between lab speech and everyday 
conversations outside the laboratory so that we can better evaluate to what extent and in 
which respects lab-speech findings should or should not be generalized to everyday con-
versations; second, to gain control over the factors that shape speech production inside the 
laboratory in order to keep these factors constant and allow more accurate comparisons 
between the results of different studies; and third, in an effort to bridge the gap between lab 
speech and everyday conversations, to exploit the factors that shape speech production inside 
the laboratory in order to trigger or support certain speaking styles. In this context, one crucial 
question is how emotions and/or expressive speech can be enforced inside the laboratory 
without using actors or explicit instructions. 
 So far, the INSPECT initiative dealt with effects of reading lists, elicitation tasks, day 
time, font type, text type, text highlighting, musical/voice training, and the simulation of noisy 
everyday environments, see Niebuhr & Michaud (2015) for a summary. Factors to be in-
vestigated in future studies include, amongst other things, light color and light intensity inside 
the laboratory, eye contact with the dialogue partner, the type of dialogue partner, and the 
communication channel. 
 The presentation will give an overview of prosodic findings within INSPECT and 
other related findings in the literature, with special emphasis on the effects of elicitation tasks 
on pitch-accent (focus) production, fluency, expressive functions, laughter, breathing, and 
changes of prosodic patterns over time. 
 
References 
 
Dellwo, V., A. Leemann, M.-J. Kolly (2015). The recognition of read and spontaneous speech in local vernacular: The case 
of Zurich German. J. of Phonetics 48, 13-28 
Mixdorff, H., H.R. Pfitzinger (2005). Analysing Fundamental Frequency Contours and Speech Rate in Map Task Dialogs. 
Speech Communication 46, 310-325. 
Niebuhr, O., A. Michaud (2015). Speech data acquisition - The underestimated challende. Kalipho 3, 1-42. 
Wagner, P., J. Trouvain, F. Zimmerer (2015). In defense of stylistic diversity in speech research. J. of Phonetics 48, 1-12. 
Xu, Y. (2010). In defense of lab speech. Journal of Phonetics 38, 329-336. 


INSPECT: Innovating Speech Elicitation Techniques

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of Southern Denmark Research Output