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Speech islands are historically and developmentally unique and will inevitably disappear within the next decades. We urgently need to preserve their remains and exploit what is left in order to make research on language-in-contact and historical as well as current comparative language research possible.
The Archive for Spoken German (AGD) at the Institute for German Language collects, fosters and archives data from completed research projects and makes them available to the wider research community.
Besides large variation corpora and corpora of conversational speech, the archive already contains a range of collections of data on German speech minorities. The latter will be outlined in this chapter. Some speech island data is already made available through the personal service of the AGD, or the database of spoken German (DGD), e.g. data on Australian German, Unserdeutsch, or German in North America. Some corpora are still being prepared for publication, but still important to document for potentially interested research projects. We therefore also explain the current problems and efforts related to the curation of speech island data, from the digitization of recordings and the collection of metadata, to the integration of transcriptions, annotations and other ways of accessing and sharing data.
This paper examines multi-unit turns that allow speakers to retrospectively close the prior sequence while prospectively launching a new sequence, which Schegloff (1986) referred to as interlocking organization. Using English telephone conversations as data, we focus on how multi-unit turns are used for topic shifts, and show that interlocking organization operates in conjunction with other phonetic and lexical features, such as increased pitch and overt markers of disjunction (e.g., “listen”). In addition, speakers utilize an audible inbreath that is placed between the first and the second units as a central interactional resource to project further talk, thereby suppressing speaker transition and possibly highlighting the action delivered in the second unit as being distinctly new. We propose that interlocking multi-unit turns, when used to make topically disjunctive moves, promote progressivity by avoiding a possible lapse in turn transition
For many reasons, Mennonite Low German is a language whose documentation and investigation is of great importance for linguistics. To date, most research projects that deal with this language and/ or its speakers have had a relatively narrow focus, with many of the data cited being of limited relevance beyond the projects for which they were collected. In order to create a resource for a broad range of researchers, especially those working on Mennonite Low German, the dataset presented here has been transformed into a structured and searchable corpus that is accessible online. The translations of 46 English, Spanish, or Portuguese stimulus sentences into Mennonite Low German by 321 consultants form the core of the MEND-corpus (Mennonite Low German in North and South America) in the Archive for Spoken German. In addition to describing the origin of this corpus and discussing possibilities and limitations for further research, we discuss the technical structure and search possibilities of the Database for Spoken German. Among other things, this database allows for a structured search of metadata, a context-sensitive token search, and the generation of virtual corpora that can be shared with others. Moreover, thanks to its text-sound alignment, one can easily switch from a particular text section of the corpus to the corresponding audio section. Aside from the desire to equip the reader with the technical knowledge necessary to use this corpus, a further goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the corpus still offers many possibilities for future research.
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
Looking at gestures as a means for communication, they can serve conversational participants at several levels. As co-speech gestures, they can add information to the verbally expressed content and they can serve to manage turn-taking. In order to look closer at the interplay between these resources in face-to face conversation, we annotated hand gestures, syntactic completion points and the related turn-organisation, and measured the timing of gesture strokes and their lexical/phrasal referent. In a case study on German, we observe the trend that speakers vary less in gesturelexis on- and offsets when keeping the turn after syntactic completions than at speaker changes, backchannel or other locations of a conversation. This indicates that timing properties of non-verbal cues interact with verbal cues to manage turn-taking.
Smooth turn-taking in conversation depends in part on speakers being able to communicate their intention to hold or cede the floor. Both prosodic and gestural cues have been shown to be used in this context. We investigate the interplay of pitch movements and hand gestures at locations at which speaker change becomes relevant, comparing their use in German and Swedish. We find that there are some shared functions of prosody and gesture with regard to turn-taking in the two languages, but that these shared functions appear to be mediated by the different phonological demands on pitch in the two languages.
To date, little is known about prosodic accommodation and its conversational functions in instances of overlapping talk in conversation. A major conversational action that happens in overlap is turn competition. It is not known whether participants accommodate prosodic parameters locally in the overlapped turn (initialisation) or access a repertoire of prosodic patterns that refer to general prosodic parameter norms (normalisation) when competing for the turn in overlap. This paper investigates the initialisation and normalisation of fundamental frequency (f0) and assesses its role as a resource for turn competition in overlap. We drew instances of overlapping talk from a corpus of conversational multi-party interactions in British English. We annotated the overlaps on a competitiveness scale and categorised them by overlap onset position and conversational function. We automatically extracted f0 parameters from the speech signal and processed them into f0 accommodation features that represent the normalising or the initialising use of f0. Using decision tree classification we found that f0 accommodation is only relevant as a turn competitive resource in overlaps that start clearly before a speaker transition. In this turn context, we found that normalising and initialising f0 features can both be relevant turn competitive resources. Their deployment depends on the conversational function of overlap.