Examining Temporal Structure of Speech with a Local Articulation Rate Metric

The primary goal of our study is to propose a method of calculating and visualising local articulation rate for research in temporal structure of speech. The method builds on proportional durations of vowels and consonants in Czech, which normalizes for inherent durations of phones. We first demonst...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jan Volín, Michaela Svatošová
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Lodz University Press 2023-12-01
Series:Research in Language
Subjects:
Online Access:https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/research/article/view/21536
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The primary goal of our study is to propose a method of calculating and visualising local articulation rate for research in temporal structure of speech. The method builds on proportional durations of vowels and consonants in Czech, which normalizes for inherent durations of phones. We first demonstrate the importance of temporal structure on several conspicuous features: phrase-final deceleration, prominence marking, parentheticals, and information structure constituents. We then describe our method stepwise so that it could be tested by interested parties. We illustrate such testing on a sample of news bulletin sentences produced by 26 speakers. The results confirm that our procedure can meaningfully reflect various temporal features, including the ‘information status’ of words in contextually grounded utterances.
ISSN:1731-7533