Articulation Rate

The paper discusses the notion of parentheticals in Russian spoken discourse. Using data from two prosodically annotated corpora-"Stories about presents and skiing" and "Russian Pear Chats & Stories"-I advocate for a discourse-oriented approach to parenthetical constructions. I define a parenthetical construction as consisting of three elements: the left context, the parenthetical unit, and the right context. Each element constitutes a separate discourse unit and is thus prosodically autonomous. I rely on the notion of projection [Auer 2005] to account for the discourse relationships between these three components. When the speaker pronounces the left context, she projects a continuation that is to be realized in the right context, while the parenthetical unit provides a digressive discourse step. Typically (around 50% in my data), parentheticals are anchored to their left contexts and are pronounced with a falling or level pitch accent. Noted deviations from this prototype include free parentheticals, parenthetical uses of vot, and parentheticals pronounced with a rising pitch accent. Furthermore, I explore two prosodic features frequently associated with parentheticals, namely, increased articulation rate and pitch range narrowing. I show that, while both these tendencies are statistically significant, the latter has a larger effect size than the former.

This investigation compares articulation rates of phonological and phonetic syllables in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish to investigate differences in degrees of syllable deletion (reduction) among these three languages. For the investigation two sets of data are used: one consisting of recorded speech from radio news and another consisting of sentences read aloud. The results of the comparative investigation show that in both data sets Danish exhibits a much larger degree of syllable reduction in speech than Norwegian and Swedish. The finding that certain syllable deletion processes take place in Danish but not in Norwegian and Swedish is viewed as typological. The results indicate that Danish words are shorter than their Norwegian and Swedish counterparts. This could be a contributing factor to problems that arise in inter-Scandinavian communication.

The purpose of the research is to examine the possibility of forensic speaker identification if question and suspect sample are in different languages using temporal parameters (articulation rate, speaking rate, degree of hesitancy, percentage of pauses, average pause duration). The corpus includes 10 female native speakers of Serbian who are proficient in English. The parameters are tested using Bayesian likelihood ratio formula in 40 same-speaker and 360 different-speaker pairs, including estimation of error rates, equal error rates and Overall Likelihood Ratio. One-way ANOVA is performed to determine whether inter-speaker variability is higher than intra-speaker variability across languages. The most successful discriminant is degree of hesitancy with ER of 42.5%/28%, (EER: 33%), followed by average pause duration with ER 35%/45.56%, (EER: 40%). Although the research features a closed-set comparison, which is not very common in

In this talk, I analyze patterns of articulation rate and tonal register of parenthetical constructions found in two prosodically annotated corpora of Russian spoken discourse. I define a parenthetical construction as a sentence-level phenomenon that consists of three prosodically autonomous elements — the left context, the parenthetical unit, and the right context. Prototypically, parenthetical units are anchored to their left contexts and are pronounced with a falling or level pitch accent. Overall, 114 relevant examples were included in the study. They were examined for three parameters: articulation rate, mean pitch value, and interdecile pitch range. Praat software was used for measurements; values obtained for parenthetical units were independently compared to those of left and right contexts.
All three parameters showed statistical significance. Parenthetical units tend to have higher articulation rate, lower mean pitch value and more narrow pitch range than their contexts. However, these tendencies vary in effect size, as pitch range in parenthetical units changes more dramatically than two other measures. Given that, I tentatively claim that narrowing the pitch range can be regarded as the key prosodic means that speakers use to distinguish parentheticals from the main line in spontaneous discourse.

El objetivo de este artículo es exponer los resultados de un estudio normativo del rendimiento articulatorio de individuos chilenos normales, medido con los cinco parámetros que entrega el protocolo de rendimiento diadococinético del programa Motor Speech Profile de KayPentax. La intención es proporcionar a la comunidad fonoaudiológica valores de referencia de una muestra de hablantes del país para que puedan ser utilizados en la aplicación clínica y académica de este instrumento. Mediante el procedimiento de muestra espejo, se replica el estudio con el que se obtuvieron los valores de referencia originales del programa en una muestra de hablantes de inglés norteamericano. Además, se comparan ambos estudios con el propósito de determinar las diferencias y similitudes en el rendimiento de cada uno de los parámetros. Se concluye que tanto el DDKcvp como el DDKcvi manifiestan un comportamiento similar en ambos grupos y que el resto de los parámetros presenta ciertas diferencias. No obstante, en todos los parámetros es posible establecer un rango de variación que permite definir el comportamiento normal.

Disfluencies are a regular feature of spontaneous speech, and much has been learnt about the effects of various linguistic factors on their production. Speech usually occurs within dialogue, yet little is known about the influence of an interlocutor's speech on a speaker's own fluency. It has been shown that speakers tend to align on various levels, converging, for example, on lexical, and syntactic levels. But we know little about convergence in rate of speech or disfluency. Little is also known about the effects of speech rate on fluency in a speaker's own speech. In this paper, we examine these effects through analysis of speech rate, hesitation and error correction in a corpus of task-oriented dialogues (the HCRC Map Task Corpus). Our findings demonstrate that different types of disfluencies can be influenced in different ways by speech rate. Furthermore, the probability of an interlocutor being disfluent appears to affect the speaker's own likelihood, raising the possibility that interlocutors may "align" on disfluent, as well as fluent, speech.