Using periodic energy to enrich acoustic representations of pitch in speech: A demonstration

Albert, Aviad; Cangemi, Francesco; Grice, Martine

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2018-162

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…Phrasing-related effects on perceived prominence are attributed to the salience of final constituents over non-final domains within a domain, rather than representing them (like focus) by projectionheight. 34 A promising measure we have not considered yet is the combination of F0 information with the periodic energy curve (Albert et al, 2018;Cangemi et al, 2019).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Wagner

McAuliffe

2019

Journal of Phonetics

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Prosody simultaneously encodes different kinds of information about an utterance, including the type of speech act (which, in English, often affects the choice of intonational tune), the syntactic constituent structure (which mainly affects prosodic phrasing), and the location of semantic focus (which mainly affects the relative prosodic prominence between words). The syntactic and semantic functional dimensions (speech act, constituency, focus) are orthogonal to each other, but to which extent their prosodic correlates are remains controversial. This paper reports on a production experiment that crosses these three dimensions to look for interactions, concentrating on interactions between focus prominence and phrasing. The results provide evidence that interactions are more limited than many current theories of sentence prosody would predict, and support a theory that keeps different prosodic dimensions representationally separate.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Wagner

McAuliffe

2019

Journal of Phonetics

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“…Finally, we used the ProPer suite (Albert et al, 2021 ) to extract the variables' periodic energy mass and synchrony. ProPer extracts smoothed periodic energy curves from the signal and quantify the area under the curve as the periodic energy mass in the interval corresponding to the stressed syllable.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracing the Phonetic Space of Prosodic Focus Marking

Roessig

Winter

Mücke

2022

Front. Artif. Intell.

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Focus is known to be expressed by a wide range of phonetic cues but only a few studies have explicitly compared different phonetic variables within the same experiment. Therefore, we presented results from an analysis of 19 phonetic variables conducted on a data set of the German language that comprises the opposition of unaccented (background) vs. accented (in focus), as well as different focus types with the nuclear accent on the same syllable (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus). The phonetic variables are measures of the acoustic and articulographic signals of a target syllable. Overall, our results provide the highest number of reliable effects and largest effect sizes for accentuation (unaccented vs. accented), while the differentiation of focus types with accented target syllables (broad, narrow, and contrastive focus) are more subtle. The most important phonetic variables across all conditions are measures of the fundamental frequency. The articulatory variables and their corresponding acoustic formants reveal lower tongue positions for both vowels /o, a/, and larger lip openings for the vowel /a/ under increased prosodic prominence with the strongest effects for accentuation. While duration exhibits consistent mid-ranked results for both accentuation and the differentiation of focus types, measures related to intensity are particularly important for accentuation. Furthermore, voice quality and spectral tilt are affected by accentuation but also in the differentiation of focus types. Our results confirm that focus is realized via multiple phonetic cues. Additionally, the present analysis allows a comparison of the relative importance of different measures to better understand the phonetic space of focus marking.

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“…Lastly, this study also provides compelling motivations and strong evidence that support our proposal to link the notion of sonority with periodic energy in the acoustic signal. This proposal entails that the role of periodic energy is of great importance to linguistic analysis of speech, beyond the scope of the current proposal-a partial list of relevant topics includes: (i) acoustic descriptions of prosodic weight and prosodic prominence in terms of periodic energy mass; (ii) automatic syllabification procedures based on the smoothed fluctuation rates of the periodic energy curve (useful for a myriad of tasks, including speech rhythmicity studies; see, e.g., Galves, Garcia, Duarte, & Galves, 2002;Lin & Rathcke, 2020;Räsänen, Doyle, & Frank, 2018;Tilsen & Arvaniti, 2013), and; (iii) improved visualization and analysis of pitch contours in intonation research based on the interaction of the periodic energy and the F0 trajectories (see Albert, Cangemi, & Grice, 2018;Cangemi, Albert, & Grice, 2019;and Albert, Cangemi, Ellison, & Grice, 2020 for continuous visualization and quantification procedures in intonational phonology using periodic energy).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling sonority in terms of pitch intelligibility with the Nucleus Attraction Principle

Albert¹,

Nicenboim²

2020

Preprint

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Sonority is a fundamental notion in phonetics and phonology, central to many descriptions of the syllable and evidently useful as a predictor of phonotactics (i.e., the propensity of different consonants and vowels to combine via concatenation). Although widely-accepted, sonority lacks a clear basis in speech articulation or perception, and traditional sonority principles exhibit gaps in empirical coverage, while they are also not designed to be compatible with general cognitive capacities. Against the backdrop of traditional sonority accounts, which have been exclusively based on discrete and symbolic machinery to model sonority, we propose an incorporation of symbol-based and signal-based models to adequately account for sonority with two complementary models. We claim that sonority is primarily a perceptual phenomenon related to the strength and quality of pitch perception, postulating a universal drive to optimize syllables as pitch-bearing units. We suggest a measurable acoustic correlate for sonority in terms of periodic energy, and we provide a novel principle that can account for syllabic well-formedness based on principles of competition in real-time; the Nucleus Attraction Principle (NAP). We present two perception experiments that test our two NAP-based models against four traditional sonority models and we use a Bayesian data analysis approach to test and compare the different sonority models. We show that our two NAP models retain the highest degree of complementarity while one of them is clearly superior to all the other models we tested. We interpret the results as providing strong support for our proposals: (i) the designation of periodic energy as sonority's correlate; (ii) the incorporation of continuity in phonological models, and; (iii) the dual-model strategy that separates and integrates symbol-based top-down processes and signal-based bottom-up processes.

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Using periodic energy to enrich acoustic representations of pitch in speech: A demonstration

Cited by 19 publications

References 13 publications

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

The effect of focus prominence on phrasing

Tracing the Phonetic Space of Prosodic Focus Marking

Modeling sonority in terms of pitch intelligibility with the Nucleus Attraction Principle

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