Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory

Foulkes, Paul; Docherty, Gerard J.; Hufnagel, Stefanie Shattuck; Hughes, Vincent

doi:10.1515/lingvan-2017-0032

Cited by 16 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 50 publications

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“…Whether these differences in the distribution of pitch and intensity values are reflected in listeners' perceptions, and whether these patterns are evident in speech beyond these samples, is another matter. We are wary of putting too much stock in these small statistical differences, especially where their relationship with what can be heard is unclear (Foulkes, Docherty, Shattuck‐Hufnagel, & Hughes, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, it might be argued that we should conduct more sophisticated statistical analyses; however, we are wary of doing this, especially if the relationship between the statistical analysis and what can be heard becomes unclear (Foulkes et al, ). Going forward, we instead hope to relate this to work on phonetic correlates of depression given that HADS (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale; Zigmond & Snaith, ) scores and other background data are available for most of these speakers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the potential of phonetic analysis to distinguish between people with epilepsy and non‐epileptic seizures

Walker

Moon

et al. 2019

Int J App Linguistics

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A body of research has shown that there are linguistic differences in the way people with epilepsy talk about their seizures when compared to those with non‐epileptic seizures. We extend this line of research by presenting the results of a phonetic analysis comparing speech samples from people with a confirmed diagnosis of epilepsy (7 patients), to those with a confirmed diagnosis of non‐epileptic seizures (8 patients). Variables considered include features of pitch, intensity, duration and pausing in their responses to questions from a neurologist during medical history‐taking. We find only limited evidence of differences between the two diagnostic groups (epilepsy vs. non‐epileptic seizures). We discuss possible reasons for this lack of evidence.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the potential of phonetic analysis to distinguish between people with epilepsy and non‐epileptic seizures

Walker

Moon

et al. 2019

Int J App Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…This implies that a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of linguistic systems must not be limited to propositional content (cf. Foulkes et al 2018;. There are other levels of meaning that language users express through often-neglected aspects of the speech signal such as prosody.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, productive as it is, this view of communication rests on a simplification (Foulkes et al 2018). Language performs a careful balancing act across multiple competing functions that also include the transmission of pragmatic, affectual, and social information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the tune shapes morphology: The origins of vocatives

Sóskuthy

Roettger

2020

Journal of Language Evolution

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Many languages use pitch to express pragmatic meaning (henceforth ‘tune’). This requires segmental carriers with rich harmonic structure and high periodic energy, making vowels the optimal carriers of the tune. Tunes can be phonetically impoverished when there is a shortage of vowels, endangering the recovery of their function. This biases sound systems towards the optimisation of tune transmission by processes such as the insertion of vowels. Vocative constructions—used to attract and maintain the addressee’s attention—are often characterised by specific tunes. Many languages additionally mark vocatives morphologically. In this article, we argue that one potential pathway for the emergence of vocative morphemes is the morphological re-analysis of tune-driven phonetic variation that helps to carry pitch patterns. Looking at a corpus of 101 languages, we compare vocatives to structural case markers in terms of their phonological make-up. We find that vocatives are often characterised by additional prosodic modulation (vowel lengthening, stress shift, tone change) and contain substantially fewer consonants, supporting our hypothesis that the acoustic properties of tunes interact with segmental features and can shape the emergence of morphological markers. This fits with the view that the efficient transmission of information is a driving force in the evolution of languages, but also highlights the importance of defining ‘information’ broadly to include pragmatic, social, and affectual components alongside propositional meaning.

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“…settings differed from speaker to speaker). Thus, there was no hand correction of the formant data which would, undoubtedly, have improved the accuracy of the measurements [16]. For F2, the correlations for the MFCCs and…”

Section: 3! Individual Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correlating Cepstra with Formant Frequencies: Implications for Phonetically-Informed Forensic Voice Comparison

2020

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A significant question for forensic voice comparison, and for speaker recognition more generally, is the extent to which different input features capture complementary speakerspecific information. Understanding complementarity allows us to make predictions about how combining methods using different features may produce better overall performance. In forensic contexts, it is also important to be able to explain to courts what information the underlying features are actually capturing. This paper addresses these issues by examining the extent to which MFCCs and LPCCs can predict F0, F1, F2, and F3 values using data extracted from the midpoint of the vocalic portion of the hesitation marker um for 89 speakers of standard southern British English. By-speaker correlations were calculated using multiple linear regression and performance was assessed using mean rho () values. Results show that the first two formants were more accurately predicted than F3 or F0. LPCCs consistently produced stronger correlations with the linguistic features than MFCCs, while increasing cepstral order up to 16 also increased the strength of the correlations. There was, however, considerable variability across speakers in terms of the accuracy of the predictions. We discuss the implications of these findings for forensic voice comparison.

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Three steps forward for predictability. Consideration of methodological robustness, indexical and prosodic factors, and replication in the laboratory

Cited by 16 publications

References 50 publications

On the potential of phonetic analysis to distinguish between people with epilepsy and non‐epileptic seizures

On the potential of phonetic analysis to distinguish between people with epilepsy and non‐epileptic seizures

When the tune shapes morphology: The origins of vocatives

Correlating Cepstra with Formant Frequencies: Implications for Phonetically-Informed Forensic Voice Comparison

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