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Dimensions of Segmental Variability: Interaction of Prosody and Surprisal in Six Languages
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Speech, Music and Hearing, TMH.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-5953-7310
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2018 (English)In: Frontiers in Communication, E-ISSN 2297-900X, Vol. 3, article id 00025Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Contextual predictability variation affects phonological and phonetic structure. Reduction and expansion of acoustic-phonetic features is also characteristic of prosodic variability. In this study, we assess the impact of surprisal and prosodic structure on phonetic encoding, both independently of each other and in interaction. We model segmental duration, vowel space size and spectral characteristics of vowels and consonants as a function of surprisal as well as of syllable prominence, phrase boundary, and speech rate. Correlates of phonetic encoding density are extracted from a subset of the BonnTempo corpus for six languages: American English, Czech, Finnish, French, German, and Polish. Surprisal is estimated from segmental n-gram language models trained on large text corpora. Our findings are generally compatible with a weak version of Aylett and Turk's Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis, suggesting that prosodic structure mediates between the requirements of efficient communication and the speech signal. However, this mediation is not perfect, as we found evidence for additional, direct effects of changes in surprisal on the phonetic structure of utterances. These effects appear to be stable across different speech rates.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Frontiers Media SA , 2018. Vol. 3, article id 00025
Keywords [en]
Duration, Information density, Spectral emphasis, Speech rate, Surprisal, Vowel distinctiveness
National Category
Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-314570DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2018.00025Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85066055465OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-314570DiVA, id: diva2:1674053
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QC 20220621

Available from: 2022-06-21 Created: 2022-06-21 Last updated: 2025-02-07Bibliographically approved

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Malisz, Zofia

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf