Investigating syllabic structures and their variation in spontaneous French

Adda-Decker, Martine; Mareüil, Philippe Boula de; Adda, Gilles; Lamel, Lori

doi:10.1016/j.specom.2005.03.006

Cited by 62 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 11 publications

(8 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Johnson (2004) reported on the basis of part of the Buckeye corpus (Pitt, Johnson, Hume, Kiesling, & Raymond, 2005) that in American English informal conversations over 60% of the word tokens deviate from their citation forms on at least one segment, and that in approximately 25% of the word tokens at least one segment is absent. Similar numbers have been reported for Dutch (Schuppler, Ernestus, Scharenborg, & Boves, 2011) and French (Adda-Decker, Boula de Mareüil, Adda, & Lamel, 2005). Reduced pronunciation variants appear to be more frequent in informal situations than in formal situations (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 81%

The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants

Ernestus

Hanique

Verboom

2015

Journal of Phonetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents two studies investigating how the situation in which speech is uttered affects the frequency with which words are reduced. Study 1 is based on the Spoken Dutch Corpus, which consists of 15 components, nearly all representing a different speech situation. This study shows that the components differ in how often ten semantically weak words are highly reduced. The differences are especially large between the components with scripted and unscripted speech. Within the component group of unscripted speech, the formality of the situation shows an effect. Study 2 investigated segment reduction in a shadowing experiment in which participants repeated Dutch carefully and casually articulated sentences. Prefixal schwa and suffixal /t/ were absent in participants' responses to both sentences types as often as in formal interviews. If a segment was absent, this appeared to be mostly due to extreme coarticulation, unlike in speech produced in less formal situations. Speakers thus adapted more to the formal situation of the experiment than to the stimuli to be shadowed. We conclude that speech situation affects the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants, which should be accounted for by psycholinguistic models of speech production and comprehension.

show abstract

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 81%

The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants

Ernestus

Hanique

Verboom

2015

Journal of Phonetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It can also be highlighted that syllable-based features are in the top of the list. These conclusions are consistent with previous studies [18,3,1].…”

Section: Linguistic Feature Selectionsupporting

confidence: 94%

Probabilistic Speaker Pronunciation Adaptation for Spontaneous Speech Synthesis Using Linguistic Features

Qader

Lecorvé

Lolive

et al. 2015

Statistical Language and Speech Processing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Pronunciation adaptation consists in predicting pronunciation variants of words and utterances based on their standard pronunciation and a target style. This is a key issue in text-to-speech as those variants bring expressiveness to synthetic speech, especially when considering a spontaneous style. This paper presents a new pronunciation adaptation method which adapts standard pronunciations to the style of individual speakers in a context of spontaneous speech. Its originality and strength are to solely rely on linguistic features and to consider a probabilistic machine learning framework, namely conditional random fields, to produce the adapted pronunciations. Features are first selected in a series of experiments, then combined to produce the final adaptation method. Backend experiments on the Buckeye conversational English speech corpus show that adapted pronunciations significantly better reflect spontaneous speech than standard ones, and that even better could be achieved if considering alternative predictions.

show abstract

“…The ASR system chose the most probable pronunciation variant for each word token. The acoustic phone models were trained at a frame shift of 5 ms instead of the default of 10 ms (e.g Van Bael et al, 2007b;Adda-Decker et al, 2005;Schuppler et al, 2009) in order to improve the annotation of very short segments, which are especially frequent in spontaneous speech. The lexicon with pronunciation variants had one major improvement over previous lexica used for the automatic creation of phonetic transcriptions for Dutch (Cucchiarini and Binnenpoorte, 2002;Van Bael et al, 2007b): Our lexicon contained pronunciation variants generated by, among others, vowel deletion rules that referred to the stress patterns and syllable structures of the words (3.2 -3.4 in Table 2 and 4.13 -4.19 Table 3).…”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The models were trained at a frame shift of 5 ms and a window length of 25 ms, where for each frame 13 MFCCs (i.e., the mel-scaled cepstral coefficients C0-C12) and their first and second order derivatives (39 features) were calculated. We used a shorter frame shift than the default of 10 ms used in earlier studies of segmental reductions (e.g., Van Bael et al, 2007b;Adda-Decker et al, 2005;Schuppler et al, 2009) tin order to achieve more accurate positions of the segment boundaries and in order to be able to identify very short segments. With a frame shift of 5ms and acoustic models consisting of three emitting states (no skips), segments will be assigned a minimum length of 15ms.…”

Section: Corpus Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic reduction in conversational Dutch: A quantitative analysis based on automatically generated segmental transcriptions

Schuppler

Ernestus

Scharenborg

et al. 2011

Journal of Phonetics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In spontaneous, conversational speech, words are often reduced compared to their citation forms, such that a word like yesterday may sound like ['jESeI]. The present paper investigates such acoustic reduction . The study of reduction needs large corpora that are transcribed phonetically. The first part of this paper describes an automatic transcription procedure used to obtain such a large phonetically transcribed corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues, which is subsequently used for the investigation of acoustic reduction. First, the orthographic transcription were adapted for automatic processing. Next, the phonetic transcription of the corpus was created by means of a forced alignment with a lexicon with multiple pronunciation variants per word. These variants were generated by applying phonological and reduction rules to the canonical phonetic transcriptions of the words. The second part of this paper reports the results of a quantitative analysis of reduction in the corpus on the basis of the generated transcriptions and gives an inventory of segmental reductions in standard Dutch. Overall, we found that reduction is more pervasive in spontaneous Dutch than previously documented.

show abstract

Investigating syllabic structures and their variation in spontaneous French

Cited by 62 publications

References 11 publications

The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants

The effect of speech situation on the occurrence of reduced word pronunciation variants

Probabilistic Speaker Pronunciation Adaptation for Spontaneous Speech Synthesis Using Linguistic Features

Acoustic reduction in conversational Dutch: A quantitative analysis based on automatically generated segmental transcriptions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About