The perception of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) mid vowels is mainly investigated by foreign researchers who work with learners of Brazilian Portuguese, native speakers of English or Spanish. In Brazil, this field has been poorly explored. This work contributes to filling this gap by investigating the perception of two Brazilian Portuguese minimal vowel pairs in the group of 103 native Russian speakers and nine French speakers, most of them residing in Brazil. The test has been designed to evaluate the perception of the mid high and low front vowels [e] - [ε], and the mid high and low back vowels [o] - [ɔ]. The test is conducted online and includes 30 trials distributed in three types of tasks: image identification (8 trials), vowel identification (4) and word discrimination (18). It also contains a short sociolinguistic questionnaire. Our findings indicate that native Russian speakers do not differentiate the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels very well: the mean percentage of the correct answers in the Russophone group was 68%, while in the French group it was 87% and in the Brazilian control group 99%. No correlation was found between the percentage of correct answers and residence time in Brazil or type of language instruction. As next steps, we plan to investigate the differentiation of the Brazilian Portuguese open and close mid vowels by Russophones at the level of production. We also intend to create a training corpus and develop strategies for perception training of the Brazilian Portuguese mid vowels, monitoring their efficiency at different time points.
The present study examines acoustic manifestations of the vocal fatigue in three groups of voice professionals (pronunciation teachers, professional speakers and tourist guides) who seem to be particularly susceptible to vocal loading. In the paper data collecting and the non-fatigue/fatigue speech corpus are described. The detailed acoustic analysis of the data obtained is presented. The results of the acoustic analysis showed a consistent dependency between acoustic parameters and vocal fatigue in terms of F0, jitter and shimmer values. The results can contribute to objective voice examinations and automatic voice pathology detection.
This article presents the results of applying method for obtaining formant components of vowel phonemes for the corpus of professional reading in Russian. In this paper, a review of existing areas of development of methods for obtaining formant characteristics of vowels for different languages was made. A review was also made of the extent to which formant picture patterns are used in speech technologies and natural language processing. On the corpus of professional reading CORPRES, data was obtained on formant components for 351929 realizations of vowel phonemes on the material of 8 speakers. The data obtained are grouped in accordance with the symbols in the real transcription, which was performed by phoneticians within the framework of segmenting the corpus. The formant planes represent the distribution of allophones of vowels for all speakers according to the two first formants. The variability of formant characteristics in the corpus for pre-tonic and post-tonic allophones are presented for one male speaker. The article also presents the results testifying the difference between the rounded unstressed /i/ and /a/, which are perceived by both naive speakers and expert phoneticians as /u/. As an experimental material, the recordings of reading by one male announcer of specially selected sentences, which took into account various linguistic factors, were used. Analysis of the data of the formant components of these vowels showed that the values of the first formant of these vowels are close to the values of the stressed vowel /u/ for this speaker. The closure of these vowels corresponds to the closure of /u/. The second formant values in the vowels [u], which were to be realized as [i] and [a] are different. They are more advanced in comparison with /u/.
The paper discusses the main principles in designing and annotating speech corpora within the framework of the Saint Petersburg phonological school, and provides examples of using corpus data in phonetic research. One of the major principles that we follow is to analyse the speech material at all levels: from segmental to intonational, including speech disfluencies. During segmental phonetic annotation, we suggest listening to each speech sound in isolation (without knowing its context) and relying on spectrographic data. At the syllabic tier, it is crucial to reflect resyllabification. During prosodic annotation, we suggest to rely on listener’s perception of the intonation pattern first, then analyse the actual melodic curves. A speech corpus with multi-level annotation that follows these principles is a valuable source of phonetic data — as segmental and prosodic factors are in constant interaction with each other, and one cannot analyse units of one annotation tier without reference to other tiers.
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