{"title":"Phonetic Realization Of Information Structures In Chinese English Learners’ Reading Texts","authors":"Xinyi Wen, Yuan Jia, Ai-jun Li","doi":"10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693006","url":null,"abstract":"The present study aims to investigate the phonetic realization of information structure in L2, by comparing the productions of English discourse from Beijing English learners and from native English speakers. Phonetic and statistical analyses are conducted on English reading texts selected from Asian English Speech cOrpus Project (AESOP). The main findings include: Beijing English learners do not distinguish the given and new information with pitch range as native English speakers do, which is the main difference between the two speaker groups; the slight differences found on duration and mean pitch value might result from other factors rather than phonetic strategies utilized in information packaging. Besides, the difference between Beijing English learners' performance in lexical and referential levels mainly lies in the duration of accessible information.","PeriodicalId":303819,"journal":{"name":"2018 Oriental COCOSDA - International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133898229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Typology of Convergences and Divergences of English Monophthongs by Chinese Northeastern EFL Learners","authors":"Yuan Jia, Yu Wang","doi":"10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693007","url":null,"abstract":"The present paper investigates the acoustic features of English vowels by EFL learners (English as a Foreign Language) from Dalian (DL) and Harbin (HRB) dialectal regions, both of which belong to the Chinese Northeastern area. Eleven English monophones, i.e., /i/, /u/, /a/ etc. are selected as target samples and their corresponding F1& F2 formants are employed as parameters to approach the research aim. Through analyzing the acoustic results, this paper focuses on exploring the degree of phonetic transfer of dialects (L1) onto English (L2). The Speech Learning Model (SLM) is adopted to examine the differences caused by the dialectal accent. The results show that, with regard to the tongue position of vowels, EFL learners from these two dialectal regions do show a great divergence from the American (AM) native speakers. As for DL learners, it is difficult for them to make tense-lax contrasts in/i/-/ɪ/, /$varepsilon$/-/æ/ and /u/-/ʊ/. Specifically, /i/ and /u/ are affected by DL dialect, which can be explained by SLM. On the other hand, /$alpha$/ produced by DL and HRB learners is similar to that of American speakers. Besides, DL and HRB learners produce longer vowels in duration.","PeriodicalId":303819,"journal":{"name":"2018 Oriental COCOSDA - International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments","volume":"16 3","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132900872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tonal Target and Peak Delay in Mandarin Neutral Tone","authors":"Ai-jun Li, Zhiqiang Li, G. Huang, Liang Zhang","doi":"10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693027","url":null,"abstract":"We examined the tonal target of the neutral tone syllable, F0 peak delay and the F0 preplanning process in production of Mandarin neutral tone by manipulating the number of neutral tone syllables and the preceding tonal contexts. The results showed that 1) the tonal target of neutral tone was L; 2) its realization was greatly influenced by the number of neutral tone syllables, as well as the prosodic structure; 3) the F0 pattern of the neutral tone depended on the tonal target of the proceeding non-neutral syllable. Specifically, the interpolation rule realized between the end position of F0 in T1 and T4, or the Peak Delay in T2 and T3, and the target position of neutral tone; and 4) with the increasing number of neutral syllables, the initial F0 in the prosodic unit also increased accordingly, indicating that our pitch preplanning ability was closely related to the prosodic structure.","PeriodicalId":303819,"journal":{"name":"2018 Oriental COCOSDA - International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments","volume":"173 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116841210","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Wutiwiwatchai, P. Chootrakool, S. Kasuriya, Kalyanee Makarabhirom, Nantiya Ooppanasak, B. Prathanee
{"title":"Naso-Articulometry Speech Database For Cleft-Palate Speech Assessment","authors":"C. Wutiwiwatchai, P. Chootrakool, S. Kasuriya, Kalyanee Makarabhirom, Nantiya Ooppanasak, B. Prathanee","doi":"10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693008","url":null,"abstract":"Cleft palate has impact to speech, language and hearing problems. Speech therapy is a common treatment process required after surgery. To improve the assessment efficiency in patient with nasalance and articulation disorders, a novel equipment called Naso-articulometer (NASAM) has been introduced to speech and language pathologists (SLP). NASAM has been incrementally developed and used to collect speech data from cleft-palate and normal speakers in word and sentence levels as well as specifically to design for medical assessment. With the proposed new equipment, several issues regarding the assessment process and signal processing are raised to research. This paper was documented the detail of NASAM and speech collection, and addressed important speech processing issues with some preliminary experimental results.","PeriodicalId":303819,"journal":{"name":"2018 Oriental COCOSDA - International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments","volume":"168 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128234179","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Examining the Influence of Word Tonality on Pitch Contours When Singing in Mandarin","authors":"Yi-Jhe Lee, Bang-Yin Chen, Yun-Ting Lai, Hsueh-Wei Liao, Ting-Chun Liao, Sheng-Lun Kao, Kuan-Yi Kang, Chun-Tang Hsu, Yi-Wen Liu","doi":"10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693016","url":null,"abstract":"In Mandarin, word meanings are differentiated by tones. Therefore, when a Mandarin song is sung according to its musical melody, word meanings could potentially be misunderstood. In this research, we intend to investigate whether or not a singer would adjust the pitch contour so as to best convey word meanings. A Mandarin singing dataset is currently being manually parsed into single words, phonetics of which are manually transcribed (including the tones), and for each word the pitch contour is calculated by the YIN algorithm. Afterwards, the distance between arbitrary pairs of contours can be calculated by a dynamic time warping-based method. By comparing average same-tone distances with the distances calculated without distinguishing the tones, one can measure the extent to which a singer modifies his/her pitch inflection, consciously or not, according to the actual tone of the word. Some mixed results are reported.","PeriodicalId":303819,"journal":{"name":"2018 Oriental COCOSDA - International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130310348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Parenthetical - A Special Type of Prosodic Reduction in Continuous Speech","authors":"Chiu-yu Tseng, Helen Kai-Yun Chen, Yen-Hsing Chen","doi":"10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSDA.2018.8693026","url":null,"abstract":"The current study investigates parenthetical, a type of prosodic reduction in multi-phrase speech paragraphs. Structurally a modifier of its antecedent to provide supplementary information, such reduction creates a lower level in the prosodic hierarchy nested within a discourse-prosodic unit. Perceptual annotation of parenthetical turned out to be consistent across listeners; their acoustic profiles distinctive. Further calculation of information density in relation to allocation of perceived emphasis also demonstrates that parenthetical triggered prosodic reductions are patterned and accountable. Therefore, in spite of low information standing, their existence in the prosodic hierarchy helps facilitate more precise information expression. In sum, current evidence illustrates how information planning is manifested via both emphases and reductions in global context prosody, why parenthetical caused reductions should be understood from a hierarchical perspective within speech context, and how prosodic reduction also plays a crucial role in contributing to comprehensive understanding toward context prosody.","PeriodicalId":303819,"journal":{"name":"2018 Oriental COCOSDA - International Conference on Speech Database and Assessments","volume":"102 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124159284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}