Robert Eklund

Pulmonic ingressive phonation: Diachronic and synchronic characteristics, distribution and function in animal and human sound production and in human speech

This paper looks at the phenomenon of ingressive speech, i.e. speech produced on a pulmonic ingressive airstream, set in the context of human and animal ingressive phonation. The literature on ingressive speech and phonation spanning several centuries is reviewed, as well as contemporary reports of their incidence and characteristics from both functional and acoustic perspectives. Ingressive phonation has been used as a deliberate means of speech or sound production for hundreds of years in order to achieve specific effects, and it is still used for the same purposes, by e.g. shamans and ventriloquists. In normal spoken conversation – contrary to what is often claimed – present-day ingressive speech is not limited to Scandinavia or Nordic languages, but is found on all continents, in genetically unrelated languages. Where ingressive speech occurs, it serves more or less the same paralinguistic functions, such as a feedback marker in a dialog. Since pulmonic ingressive phonation is also common in the calls of monkeys and apes, thus exhibiting a biological basis, it is suggested that ingressive speech might constitute a neglected universal phenomenon, rather than being highly marked, which is how it is commonly described in the literature.

Xenophones: an investigation of phone set expansion in Swedish and implications for speech recognition and speech synthesis

In recent years, both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) conversion systems have attained quality levels that allow inclusion in everyday applications. One remaining proble ...

Experiences of an In-Service Wizard-of-Oz Data Collection for the Deployment of a Call-Routing Application

This paper describes our experiences of collecting a corpus of 42,000 dialogues for a call-routing application using a Wizard-of-Oz approach. Contrary to common practice in the industry, we did not use the kind of automated application that elicits some speech from the customers and then sends all of them to the same destination, such as the existing touch-tone menu, without paying attention to what they have said. Contrary to the traditional Wizard-of-Oz paradigm, our data-collection application was fully integrated within an existing service, replacing the existing touch-tone navigation system with a simulated call-routing system. Thus, the subjects were real customers calling about real tasks, and the wizards were service agents from our customer care. We provide a detailed exposition of the data collection as such and the application used, and compare our approach to methods previously used.

Interaction between prosody and discourse structure in a simulated man–machine dialogue

Automatic speech understanding systems are beginning to attain a level of sophistication where commercial applications are within reach. However, if humans and machines are ever going to communicate in a natural way, it is of vital importance that language modeling go beyond the sentence level. A profound understanding of discourse structure is required, and to this end, knowledge concerning how prosody interacts with other linguistic phenomena is needed. Not only will better prosodic modeling of discourse lead to better speech recognition/understanding, it will also yield more natural‐sounding speech synthesis. This paper reports on a dialogue/prosody project at Telia Research, Sweden. A Wizard‐of‐Oz simulation of a computerized reservation system was used to collect realistic speech data. Fifty subjects were given three tasks each that entailed the reservation of flights, trains, car hire, and hotel reservations. To avoid linguistic influence on the subjects’ utterances, the tasks were given as maps and...

Inclusion of a prosodic module in spoken language translation systems

Current speech recognition systems mainly work on statistical bases and make no use of information signalled by prosody, i.e. the segment duration and fundamental frequency contour of the speech si ...

Kulning (Swedish Cattle Calls) : Acoustic, EGG, Stroboscopic and High-Speed Video Analyses of an Unusual Singing Style

The Swedish cattle call singing style ‘kulning’ is surprisingly understudied, despite its mythical status in folklore. While some acoustic and physiological aspects have been addressed previously [ ...

Supplementary Motor Area Activation in Disfluency Perception : An fMRI Study of Listener Neural Responses to Spontaneously Produced Unfilled and Filled Pauses

Spontaneously produced Unfilled Pauses (UPs) and Filled Pauses (FPs) were played to subjects in an fMRI experiment. For both stimuli increased activity was observed in the Primary Auditory Cortex ( ...

What is invariant and what is optional in the realization of a FOCUSED word? A cross-dialectal study of Swedish sentences with moving focus

State-of-the-art speech recognition systems handle continuous speech and are speaker-independent. However, the linguistic information conveyed in the intonational contour is neglected. To be able to fully recognize speech, this information must be interpreted. To this end, explicit knowledge of dialectal and individual variation is required. Some acoustic correlates of wh-focus in three Swedish dialects are described. Variation within and between dialects is accounted for, as well as individual differences and optional phenomena.

A comparative study of focus realization in three Swedish dialects.

State-of-the-art speech recognition and speech translation systems do not currently make use of prosodic information. Utterances often have one or more constituents semantically focused by prosodic ...