25 research outputs found
Italian speakers learn lexical stress of German morphologically complex words
No full textItalian speakers tend to stress the second component of German morphologically complex words such as compounds and prefix verbs even if the first component is lexically stressed. To improve their prosodic phrasing an automatic pronunciation teaching method was developed based on auditory feedback of prosodically corrected utterances in the learners’ own voices. Basically, the method copies contours of F0, local speech rate, and intensity from reference utterances of a German native speaker to the learners’ speech signals. It also adds emphasis to the stress position in order to help the learners better recognise the correct pronunciation and identify their errors. A perception test with German native speakers revealed that manipulated utterances significantly better reflect lexical stress than the corresponding original utterances. Thus, two groups of Italian learners of German were provided with different feedback during a training session, one group with manipulated utterances in their individual voices and the other with correctly pronounced original utterances in the teacher’s voice. Afterwards, both groups produced the same sentences again and German native speakers judged the resulting utterances. Resynthesised stimuli, especially with emphasised stress, were found to be a more effective feedback than natural stimuli to learn the correct stress position. Since resynthesis was obtained without previous segmentation of the learners’ speech signals, this technology could be effectively included in Computer Assisted Language Learning software
Linguistically motivated parameter estimation methods for a superpositional intonation model
No full textThis paper proposes two novel approaches for parameter estimation of a superpositional intonation model. These approaches present linguistic and paralinguistic assumptions for initializing a pre-existing standard method. In addition, all restrictions on the configuration of commands were eliminated. The proposed linguistic hypotheses can be based on either pitch accents or lexical stress, which give rise to two different estimation methods. These two hypotheses were validated by comparison of the estimation performance relative to two standard methods, one manual and one automatic. The results of the experiments for German, English and Spanish corpora show that the proposed methods outperform the standard ones.Fil: Torres, Humberto Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo; ArgentinaFil: Gurlekian, Jorge Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo; ArgentinaFil: Mixdorff, Hansjörg. Beuth University Berlin; AlemaniaFil: Pfitzinger, Hartmut. Pfitzinger Voice Design; Alemani
H.R. Pfitzinger Towards functional modelling of relationships between the acoustics and perception of vowels
No full textThis paper summarizes our research efforts in functional modelling of the relationship between the acoustic properties of vowels and perceived vowel quality. Our model is trained on 164 short steady-state stimuli. We measured F1, F2, and additionally F0 since the effect of F0 on perceptual vowel height is evident. 40 phonetically skilled subjects judged vowel quality using the Cardinal Vowel diagram. The main focus is on refining the model and describing its transformation properties between the F1/F2 formant chart and the Cardinal Vowel diagram. An evaluation of the model based on 48 additional vowels showed the generalizability of the model and confirmed that it predicts perceived vowel quality with sufficient accuracy. 1
Text-based and Signal-based Prediction of Break Indices and Pause Durations
No full textThe relation between symbolic and signal features of prosodic
boundaries is experimentally studied using prediction methods.
Text-based break index prediction turns out to be fairly good,
but signal-based prediction and pause duration prediction perform worse. A possible reason is that random signal feature
variations, as usually produced by humans, are hard to predict
The /i/-/a/-/u/-ness of Spoken Vowels
No full textThis paper investigates acoustic, phonetic, and phonological representations of spoken vowels. For this purpose four experiments have been conducted. First, by drawing the analogy between the spectral energy distribution of vowels and the vowel space concept of Dependency Phonology, we achieve a new phonologically motivated vowel quality representation of spoken vowels which we name the /i/-/a/-/u/-ness. As a second step, it is shown that the extension of this approach is connected with the work of Pols, van der Kamp & Plomp 1969 [1] who, among other things, predicted formant frequencies from the spectral energy distribution of vowels. Third, the vowel quality relating to the IPA vowel diagram is derived directly from the spectral energy distribution. Finally, we compare this method with a formant and fundamental frequency based approach introduced by Pfitzinger 2003 [2]. While both the /i/-/a/-/u/-ness of vowels as well as the perceived vowel quality prediction are quite robust and therefore useful for both signal pre-processing and vowel quality research, the formant prediction achieved the lowest accuracy for the mapping to the IPA vowel diagram
Intrinsic Phone Durations are Speaker-Specific
No full textThis study examines the speaker's influence on mean phone durations. As long as speech rate variation is present, the result of such a study would be trivial because every speaker has a particular speech rate that naturally modifies phone durations. Therefore, in order to eliminate its influence on phone duration, we developed a normalization procedure which evens out the local variability of speech rate, and then applied it to a large database of spoken German. As would be expected, general linear model statistical analysis (GLM) showed that speech rate normalization strongly reduced the variance explained by the factor `speaker'. Nevertheless, the variance explained by the interaction between `speaker' and `phone type' remained constant. Consequently, each speaker has individual intrinsic phone durations
Unsupervised Speech Morphing between Utterances of any Speakers
No full textA new approach to speech morphing is presented which avoids the extraction of fundamental and formant frequencies as well as the detection of phone or syllable boundaries. All prominent spectral and temporal features of the source and target utterances are automatically related and interpolated. The method consists of three main parts: LPC-based source-filter decomposition, separate interpolation, and composition of the morphed speech signal. The paper focuses on the alignment and interpolation problems on three speech signal layers: the timing structure on a phone- and syllable-level, the shape of the frequency spectrum including formants and other spectral properties, and the micro-timing of the source signal. Particularly, the source signal alignment and interpolation is described since it is most crucial for the resulting quality of the modified speech signal. The new morphing procedure was applied to utterances taken from the freely available CMU ARCTIC speech corpus and assessed by a perceptual MOS experiment. Preliminar
Influence of Differences between Inverse Filtering Techniques On The Residual Signal of Speech
No full textTowards functional modelling of relationships between the acoustics and perception of vowels
No full textThis paper summarizes our research efforts in functional modelling of the relationship between the acoustic properties of vowels and perceived vowel quality. Our model is trained on 164 short steady-state stimuli. We measured F1, F2, and additionally F0 since the effect of F0 on perceptual vowel height is evident. 40 phonetically skilled subjects judged vowel quality using the Cardinal Vowel diagram. The main focus is on refining the model and describing its transformation properties between the F1/F2 formant chart and the Cardinal Vowel diagram. An evaluation of the model based on 48 additional vowels showed the generalizability of the model and confirmed that it predicts perceived vowel quality with sufficient accuracy
