Abstracthere is onsensus etween m ny linguists th t h lf of ll l ngu ges risk dis ppe ring y the end of the enturyF ho ument tion is greed to e priorityF his in ludes the pro ess of phonemi n lysis to dis over the onE tr stive sounds of l ngu ge with the resulting ene(ts of further linguisti n lysisD liter yD nd ess to spee h te hnologyF e m hineE ssisted pE pro h to phonemi n lysis h s the potenti l to gre tly speed up the pro ess nd m ke the n lysis more o je tiveF st is demonstr ted th t m hineE ssisted ppro h n m ke me surE le ontri ution to phonemi n lysis for ll the pro edures investig tedY phoneti simil rityD omplement ry distri utionD nd minim l p irsF he ev lu tion me sures introdu ed in this p per llows omprehensive qu nE tit tive omp rison etween these phonemi n lysis pro eduresF qiven the est v il le d t nd the m hineE ssisted pro edures des ri edD there is strong indi tion th t phoneti simil rity is the most import nt pie e of eviden e in phonemi n lysisF Keywords: phonemi n lysisD end ngered l ngu gesD (eld linguisti s
In community-based linguistics, community members become involved in the analysis of their own language. This insider perspective can radically increase the speed and accuracy of phonological analysis, e.g. providing rapid identification of phonemic contrasts. However, due to the nature of these community-based sessions, much of the phonetic data is left undocumented. Rather than going back to traditional fieldwork, this paper argues that corpus phonetics can be applied to recordings of the community-based analysis sessions. As a first step in this direction, cross-language forced alignment is applied to the type of data generated by a community-based session in the Nikyob language of Nigeria. The alignments are accurate and suggest that corpus phonetics could complement community-based linguistics giving community members a powerful tool to analyse their own language.
Corpus phonetics is enabling the comprehensive analysis of large digital speech collections. In this paper, we develop a corpus phonetics workflow that is flexible enough to be easily applied to under-documented languages. To test the capabilities of this workflow we choose a challenging vowel reduction and vowel harmony problem. In Kera (Chadic) it has been shown (Pearce, 2012), that not only is phonetic reduction linked to the phonetic duration of the vowel, but also that reduction is blocked in vowel harmony domains. We are able to replicate previously published experiments by Pearce that were originally completed using manual measurements. We expect that our corpus phonetics workflow will be of value to phonologists working on other languages.
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