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Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
This report presents a corpus of articulations recorded with Schlieren photography, a recording technique to visualize aeroflow dynamics for two purposes. First, as a means to investigate aerodynamic processes during speech production without any obstruction of the lips and the nose. Second, to provide material for lecturers of phonetics to illustrates these aerodynamic processes. Speech production was recorded with 10 kHz frame rate for statistical video analyses. Downsampled videos (500 Hz) were uplodad to a youtube channel for illustrative purposes. Preliminary analyses demonstrate potential in applying Schlieren photography in research.
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition and predictability influence the articulation of the frequent German word “sie” [zi] (they). We find that articulatory variability is proportional to speaking rate and the duration of [zi], and that overall variability decreases as [zi] is repeated during the experiment. Lower variability is also observed as the conditional probability of [zi] increases, and the greatest reduction in variability occurs during the execution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that practice can produce observable differences in the articulation of even the most common gestures used in speech.
The present study uses electromagnetic articulography, by which the position of tongue and lips during speech is measured, for the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze the articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation of dozens of speakers. Our results show that two Dutch dialects show clear differences in their articulatory settings, with generally a more anterior tongue position in the dialect from Ubbergen in the southern half of the Netherlands than in the dialect of Ter Apel in the northern half of the Netherlands. A comparison with formant-based acoustic measurements further reveals that articulography is able to reveal interesting structural articulatory differences between dialects which are not visible when only focusing on the acoustic signal.
A frequently replicated finding is that higher frequency words tend to be shorter and contain more strongly reduced vowels. However, little is known about potential differences in the articulatory gestures for high vs. low frequency words. The present study made use of electromagnetic articulography to investigate the production of two German vowels, [i] and [a], embedded in high and low frequency words. We found that word frequency differently affected the production of [i] and [a] at the temporal as well as the gestural level. Higher frequency of use predicted greater acoustic durations for long vowels; reduced durations for short vowels; articulatory trajectories with greater tongue height for [i] and more pronounced downward articulatory trajectories for [a]. These results show that the phonological contrast between short and long vowels is learned better with experience, and challenge both the Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and current theories of German phonology.
Analyses of jaw movement(obtained by Electromagnetic Articulography) and acoustics show that loud speech is an intricate phenomenon. Besides involving higher intensity and subglottal pressure it affects jaw movements as well as fundamental frequency and especially first formants. It is argued that all these effects serve the purpose of enhancing perceptual salience.
The goal of this study was to evaluate invariance vs. variability in both articulation and acoustics of speech production units. To keep interaction of controlled variables manageable, only a very simple subrange of speech productions was studied. Three different vowel qualities and six different consonants were examined in a VCV sequence embedded in an utterance. Beside coarticulation vocal effort was a further factor of perturbation occuring in natural speech. The set of consonants comprised various modes of articulation (stop, fricative, nasal, lateral) all produced at virtually the same place of articulation, viz. (post-) alveolar. The range of vowel environments /i:/, /e:/, /a:/ was selected for differences in height, in order to vary coarticulatory effects between the segments. Utterances were produced at two different volume levels, viz. normal and loud speech. Experiments by others have demonstrated that higher speech volume is not simply realized as a raised sound pressure level or as raised intensity. For loud speech a number of different correlates were observed, as raised subglottal pressure (see Ladefoged/McKinney 1963), raised fundamental frequency, raised first formant, and change of segmental durations (e.g. Traunmüller/Eriksson 2000). Furthermore an effect on jaw height was observed in vowels, which is that in vowel production in loud speech the jaw has a lower position. In earlier studies results have been presented for either articulatory (Schulman 1989) or acoustic changes (Traunmüller/Eriksson 2000) associated with higher volume. The present study examines effects of higher volume level on vowels as well as on consonants, in the articulatory as well as the acoustic channel. Data from six German speakers (5 male, 1 female) were recorded and analyzed. In the 266 articulatory channel jaw and tongue-tip movements were analyzed, in the acoustic domain segmental characteristics as formants, duration, intensity and fundamental frequency. The main results can be described as follows: - Jaw height in vowels depends on vowel height, in the vowel production of loud speech the jaw is lowered significantly. - Jaw height in consonants depends on the type of consonant (very high for /s/, / /, /t/, fairly low for /n/, /l/). Speaking at higher volume level does not have a significant effect on jaw height during (post-) alveoloar consonant production, coarticulatory effect of vowel context is mainly found with /n/ and /l/. - In loud speech jaw gestures have higher amplitude. - Acoustic segmental duration is changed: Vowels are lengthened and consonants are shortened. - Fundamental frequency in vowel segments is raised significantly. - In all vowels the first formant is raised. - The second formant of the non-front vowel /a:/ is raised. This work has demonstrated that jaw articulation in a number of alveolar consonants is remarkably precise and that motor equivalence only plays a minor role. Moreover, it has been shown that in the face of the generally larger variability of acoustic and articulatory parameters, the results are best considered in terms of perceptual invariants. The findings also substantiate the complexity of articulatory and acoustic reorganisation in loud speech.
Der Aufsatz widmet sich einigen markanten historischen Einzelleistungen auf dem Gebiet der mechanischen Sprachsynthese, die auch heute noch faszinierend, jedoch zumeist nur in groben Zügen bekannt sind. An der hier präsentierten Auswahl erweist sich sowohl die fesselnde Kraft eines einmal als grundsätzlich praktikabel erkannten Konzeptes der stimmlichen Anregung als auch die hieraus resultierende Originalität immer neuer Ansätze, diesem Syntheseprinzip zum technologischen Durchbruch zu verhelfen.
In mechanical speech synthesis from the 18th up to the 20th century, reed pipes were mainly used for the generation of the voice and the organ stop vox humana was central in this process. This has been described in different historical documents which report that the vox humana in some organs sounded like human vowels. In this study, tones of four different voces humanae were recorded to investigate their similarity to human vowels. The acoustical and perceptual analysis revealed that some, though not all, tones show a high similarity to selected vowels.