We examined the production of the Irish initial mutation eclipsis in two speaking styles. In initial mutation phenomena, a word appears with a different initial sound depending on the lexical or morphosyntactic environment (e.g. croí [kɾɣi] ‘(a) heart’ (radical form), (a) chroí [xɾɣi] ‘(his) heart/darling’ (séimhiú-lenition form), and (a) gcroí [ɡɾɣi] ‘their heart/darling’ (eclipsis form)). The goals of the study were:
(i)to examine whether there are acoustic differences between the initial consonants of radical word forms (e.g. [ɡ] of gruig ‘(a) frown/scowl’) and the corresponding consonants of eclipsis forms (e.g. [ɡ] of gcroí), as has been found for similar phenomena in other languages;(ii)to examine variability in the patterns of initial mutation in the speech of present-day speakers of Irish.Our analyses offer limited evidence that there may be phonetic differences between radical and corresponding eclipsis consonants, but the current data do not allow us to rule out alternative explanations. The realization of initial mutations in semi-spontaneous speech differed dramatically both from that of read speech and from the expectations of the traditional grammar. The results suggest that the realization of eclipsis and other initial mutations may be style- or register-dependent. We also found some evidence that it may vary by consonant type, in part due to phonological frequency patterns of the language.
The ongoing focus in speech technology research on machine learning based approaches leaves the community hungry for data. However, datasets tend to be recorded once and then released, sometimes behind registration requirements or paywalls. In this paper we describe our Living Audio Dataset. The aim is to provide audio data that is in the public domain, multilingual, and expandable by communities. We discuss the role of linguistic resources, given the success of systems such as Tacotron which use direct text-to-speech mappings, and consider how data provenance could be built into such resources. So far the data has been collected for TTS purposes, however, it is also suitable for ASR. At the time of publication audio resources already exist for Dutch, R.
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