Highlights New software paradigm for linguistic/phonetic tools: webservices  Webservices encapsulating basic processing tools  Webservices as building blocks for complex systems  Web interface as front end to webservices or systems of webservices  BAS CLARIN webservices: a free service to the scientific community  Multilingual automatic segmentation and labelling of speech into words and phones  Multilingual automatic text-to-phoneme conversion webservice  Multilingual syllabification webservice  Free German speech synthesis webservice The services include automatic segmentation of speech, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, syllabification, speech synthesis, and optimal symbol sequence alignment.

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The paper defines the core components of an interactive-phonetic (IP) sound change model. The starting point for the IP-model is that a phonological category is often skewed phonetically in a certain direction by the production and perception of speech. A prediction of the model is that sound change is likely to come about as a result of perceiving phonetic variants in the direction of the skew and at the probabilistic edge of the listener's phonological category. The results of agent-based computational simulations applied to the sound change in progress, /u/-fronting in Standard Southern British, were consistent with this hypothesis. The model was extended to sound changes involving splits and mergers by using the interaction between the agents to drive the phonological reclassification of perceived speech signals. The simulations showed no evidence of any acoustic change when this extended model was applied to Australian English data in which /s/ has been shown to retract due to coarticulation in /str/ clusters. Some agents nevertheless varied in their phonological categorizations during interaction between /str/ and /Str/: This vacillation may represent the potential for sound change to occur. The general conclusion is that many types of sound change are the outcome of how phonetic distributions are oriented with respect to each other, their association to phonological classes, and how these types of information vary between speakers that happen to interact with each other.

The study explored whether an asymmetric phonetic overlap between speech sounds could be turned into sound change through propagation around a community of speakers. The focus was on the change of /s/ to /ʃ/ which is known to be more likely than a change in the other direction both synchronically and diachronically. An agent-based model was used to test the prediction that communication between agents would advance /s/-retraction in /str/ clusters (e.g. string). There was one agent per speaker and the probabilistic mapping between words, phonological classes, and speech signals could be updated during communication depending on whether an agent listener absorbed an incoming speech signal from an agent talker into memory. Following interaction, sibilants in /str/ clusters were less likely to share a phonological class with prevocalic /s/ and were acoustically closer to /ʃ/. The findings lend support to the idea that sound change is the outcome of a fortuitous combination of the relative size and orientation of phonetic distributions, their association to phonological classes, and how these types of information vary between speakers that happen to interact with each other.

The Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) is the first publicly available speech corpus comprising intoxicated and sober speech of 162 female and male German speakers. Recordings are done in the automotive environment to allow for the development of automatic alcohol detection and to ensure a consistent acoustic environment for the alcoholized and the sober recording. The recorded speech covers a variety of contents and speech styles. Breath and blood alcohol concentration measurements are provided for all speakers. A transcription according to SpeechDat/Verbmobil standards and disfluency tagging as well as an automatic phonetic segmentation are part of the corpus. An Emu version of ALC allows easy access to basic speech parameters as well as the us of R for statistical analysis of selected parts of ALC. ALC is available without restriction for scientific or commercial use at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals.

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