Syllabic organization and phonetic indices in German stop-lateral clusters

Using articulatory data from five German speakers, we study how segmental sequences under different syllabic organizations respond to perturbations of phonetic parameters in the segments that compose them. Target words contained stop-lateral clusters /bl, gl, kl, pl/ in a word-initial and a cross-word context and were embedded in carrier phrases with different prosodic boundary strengths, i.e., no phrase boundary versus an utterance phrase boundary preceded the target word in the case of word-initial clusters or separated the consonants in the case of cross-word clusters. For word-initial cluster onsets, we find that increasing the lag between two consonants and C1 stop duration leads to earlier vowel initiation and reduced local timing stability across CV and CCV. Furthermore, as the inter-consonantal lag increases, C2 lateral duration decreases. In contrast, for cross-word clusters, increasing the lag between two consonants does not lead to earlier vowel initiation across CV and C#CV and robust local timing stability is maintained across CV and C#CV. Overall, the findings indicate that the effect of phonetic perturbations on the coordination patterns depends on the syllabic organization superimposed on these clusters.

Korean Prosody Phrase Boundary Prediction Model for Speech Synthesis Service in Smart Healthcare

Speech processing technology has great potential in the medical field to provide beneficial solutions for both patients and doctors. Speech interfaces, represented by speech synthesis and speech recognition, can be used to transcribe medical documents, control medical devices, correct speech and hearing impairments, and assist the visually impaired. However, it is essential to predict prosody phrase boundaries for accurate natural speech synthesis. This study proposes a method to build a reliable learning corpus to train prosody boundary prediction models based on deep learning. In addition, we offer a way to generate a rule-based model that can predict the prosody boundary from the constructed corpus and use the result to train a deep learning-based model. As a result, we have built a coherent corpus, even though many workers have participated in its development. The estimated pairwise agreement of corpus annotations is between 0.7477 and 0.7916 and kappa coefficient (K) between 0.7057 and 0.7569. In addition, the deep learning-based model based on the rules obtained from the corpus showed a prediction accuracy of 78.57% for the three-level prosody phrase boundary, 87.33% for the two-level prosody phrase boundary.

Is “limpa” a verb or an adjective?

We investigate the role of phonological phrase boundary cues on syntactic parsing by Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth, BP) native adults. It is assumed that speech is organized in a hierarchy of prosodic constituents that may relate to constituents of other components of grammar (Nespor e Vogel, 1986). Although this is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship, a mapping is possible between constituents of each component, such as between phonological phrases and certain syntactic unit. The production of reliable prosodic cues in spontaneous speech is controversial. For instance, Snedeker e Trueswell (2003) propose that only expert speakers produce disambiguating prosodic cues; for Kraljic e Brennan (2005), even naïve speakers produce prosodic cues that are helpful for listeners. Millotte et al. (2007) found that French native speakers produced reliable prosodic cues (phrase-final lengthening and pitch rise) when they read pairs of ambiguous sentences that differed in their prosodic structures. The authors also found that native listeners were able to use these cues to assign the ambiguous words to their correct lexical categories. Then, -boundary cues may help native listeners to correctly analyze ambiguous sentences. Motivated by the French experiment results, we proposed two experiments in order to test the influence of prosody on syntactic analysis by BP adults. In the first experiment, a sentence-reading task, participants produced different prosodic patterns for ambiguous words (verb or adjective) in different syntactic structures. Duration, pitch and energy values of the segments around the-boundaries were measured and revealed that (i)-boundaries were marked by acoustical reliable cues; and (ii) the lexical categories N, V and ADJ have different behaviors in the prosodic structure. Figure A: Example of the Noun + ambiguous word - Adj [garota MUDA] (on the left) and V [garota] [MUDA…] (on the right).In the second experiment, listeners were asked to complete the auditory ambiguous sentences that were just cut after the target words (Eu acho que a menina LIMPA… . I think the clean girl…/the girl cleans…). Participants gave more verb responses in the Verb condition and more adjective responses in the Adjective condition. These results suggest that BP adults are able to use phonological phrase boundary cues to decide if an ambiguous word is a verb or an adjective and, then, to constrain syntactic analysis. We discuss the implication of these results for models of online syntactic analysis and language acquisition.Figure B: Experiment 2- Mean number of adjective and verb responses given to adjective and verb sentences (out of 4 possible responses for each sentence type).

An Anti-contiguity Approach to Nupe Interrogative Distribution

This chapter furnishes additional support for the Anti-contiguity theory of wh- prosody by demonstrating that it derives two surprising and mysterious asymmetries of Nupe wh- syntax. The first asymmetry concerns the fact that in embedded clauses the structurally lowest wh- item in a multiple wh- question may not appear in-situ. The second asymmetry concerns the availability of embedded non-interrogative focus and the impossibility of embedded interrogative focus. Both of these asymmetries are argued to be explainable in terms of the Anti-contiguity ban on contiguous wh- phrasing with overt C at the Intonational Phrase level, given that overt embedded C does not introduce an Intonational Phrase boundary in Nupe, as in Wasa and Asante Twi. As a consequence, no Intonational Phrase boundary insulates focused embedded wh- items from overt embedding complementizers, therefore running afoul of the Anti-contiguity prohibition.

Instruction Task for Malay Phrase Boundary Annotation

The paper presents a refined instruction task to assist evaluation of prosodic phrase (PPh) boundaries by naive listeners. The results from the perceptual experiments were compared to the boundaries produced by online automatic tagger. The Kappa evaluation shows the average of 85% on inter-rater agreement. More than 60% of the boundaries which are detected by the automatic tagger matched the reference boundaries, showing that the refined instruction task can be used to evaluate perception on phrase boundaries on continuous speech.