William J. Barry

Cross-language similarities and differences in spontaneous speech patterns

Quasi-spontaneous dialogues from six languages which, according to recent discussion of rhythmic types, belong to three rhythmic groups – Russian and Bulgarian as ‘stress-timed’, Italian and Greek as ‘syllable-timed’ and Polish and Czech as an intermediate ‘mixed’ type – were examined for the following segmental reduction phenomena: reduction of consonant clusters, weakening of consonant articulation, residual properties from elided consonants in the original context segments, phonetic schwa-isation and syllable elision. The hypothesis tested was that there are comparable reduction phenomena in all languages since all languages allow for variation in the time and effort invested in any given part of an utterance as a means to support the relative weight of elements within the information structure. This hypothesis was borne out in principle, though there were a small number of exceptions across the six languages to the occurrence of reduction types examined.

Do Rhythm Measures Reflect Perceived Rhythm

In a production study, Bulgarian, English and German verses with regular poetic metrical metres of different types and elicited prose utterances with varied accentual patterns are produced in textual and iterative (dada) form and measured at syllable level according to the pairwise variability index (PVI) principle. Systematic differences in PVI values show that the measure is sensitive to metrical differences. But variations for utterances with the same metrical structure and comparable measures for accentually different utterances show the measure to be insensitive to the temporal distribution of accents. A perceptual experiment with Bulgarian, English and German subjects confirms the hypothesis that the perceived strength of rhythmicity in a line of verse is determined not only by its temporal structure, but also by other acoustic properties, most clearly by F₀ change within the metrical foot.

BABEL: an Eastern European multi-language database

BABEL is a joint European project under the COPERNICUS scheme (Project 1304), comprising partners from five Eastern European countries and three Western ones. The project is producing a multi-language database of five of the most widely-differing Eastern European languages (Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian and Polish). The collection and formatting of the data conforms to the protocols established by the ESPRIT SAM project and the resulting EUROM databases.

On the use of data-driven clustering technique for identification of poly- and mono-phonemes for four European languages

The research reported in this paper presents a method to identify poly- and mono-phonemes for four European languages. The functionality of the poly-phonemes is tested in two experiments, and a limited set of mono-phonemes is identified for a language-identification experiment. Ten acoustically-similar speech sounds were identified across the four languages British-English, Danish, German, and Italian. These sounds, which constitute a substantial proportion of the phonemes of each language, are designated as (language independent) poly-phonemes, and may serve as a multi-lingual training base for labelling and recognition systems. The remaining sounds of each language, which do not fulfil the similarity conditions, are dubbed mono-phonemes. Two application experiments were conducted. In the first the poly-phonemes are applied in a label alignment task. In the second a small selected of mono-phonemes for each of the four languages is used in a preliminary test of the ability of these sets to serve as language discriminators.<<ETX>>

Another R-tickle

In the hope of provoking discussion, an attempt is made to combine articulatory, perceptual and acoustic considerations in relating the observed variants of R to one another. An underlying, and in itself debatable point of departure for the discussion is that there is a universal non-lateral liquid from which all R variants ultimately stem

Multi-lingual label alignment using acoustic-phonetic features derived by neural-network technique

In previous work on label alignment, encouraging results were obtained using selected acoustic-phonetic features to model the individuals speech phonemes. Selection was based on minimal covariance between features on the one hand, and the inclusion of features underlying critical phonological opposition on the other. In the present work, principal component analysis was applied to give a number of uncorrelated output parameters which maximally exploit the discriminatory power of the features and are derived independently of the phonological functionality. Results of label alignment on three different European languages, Danish, English, and Italian, using different numbers of principal parameters show that the accuracy with ten parameters is at least as good as with 15 manually selected features. The best result is found for British English, which has 78% of its phoneme transition boundaries positioned within +or-20 ms of manually placed reference boundaries.<<ETX>>

Prosodic Functions Revisited Again

The problems of prosodic analysis are discussed within a three-tier framework of phonetic substance, descriptive categories and communicative function. The relationship between the levels is seen as e

Strength of British English Accents in Altered Listening Conditions

This work is concerned with the processing or representational level at which accent forms learned early in life can change and with whether alteration to a speaker’s auditory environment can elicit an original accent. In Experiment 1, recordings were made of an equal number of (1) speakers living in the home counties (HC) of Britain (around the London conurbation) who claimed to have retained the accent of the region that they originally had come from, (2) speakers who stated that they had lost their regional accent and acquired an HC accent, and (3) native HC speakers. They read two texts in a normal listening environment. Listeners rated the similarity in accent between each of these texts and all the other texts. The results showed that in the normal listening conditions, the speakers who had lost their accent were rated as being more similar to HC English speakers than to those speakers from the same region who had retained their accent. In Experiment 2, recordings of the same speakers under frequency-shifted and delayed auditory feedback, as well as the normal listening conditions used earlier, were rated in order to see whether the manipulations of listening environment would elicit the speaker’s original accent. Listeners rated similarity of accent in a sample of speech recorded under normal listening against a sample read by another speaker in one of the altered listening conditions. When listening condition was altered, the speakers who had lost their original accent were rated as more similar to those who had retained their accent. It is concluded that accent differences can be elicited by altering listening environment because the speech systems of speakers who have lost their accent are more vulnerable than those of speakers who have not changed their original accent.

Bilateral high-frequency electrical impulses to the thalamus reduce voice tremor: acoustic and electroglottographic analysis. A case report

An 81-year-old female patient suffering from disabling Holmes’ tremor affecting both upper extremities, the head and additionally the vocal apparatus underwent bilateral thalamic ventralis intermedius nucleus (v.i.m.) stimulation. With the stimulation ON, the patient experienced complete suppression of the limb and head tremor and thorough voice normalization. Acoustic and electroglottographic (EGG) analysis showed a tendency towards hyperfunctional phonation with the stimulation ON as well as OFF, but a less disturbed vocal cord vibration pattern with the stimulation ON in comparison with a group of normal female speakers. This example shows that long-term monitoring of the vocal apparatus under deep brain stimulation therapy (DBS) of movement disorders must be planned in order to modify the stimulation parameters, if necessary, or to initiate logopaedic treatment.

Schwa vs. Schwa + /r/ in German

German has two functionally distinctive vowels that only occur in unstressed position, one being schwa, the other stemming from schwa + vocalized /r/. Although traditionally acknowledged, with an esta