Gesture communication, like prosody and paralinguistic voice features, strikes the attention when there is too little of it, too much of it, or when it does not seem to fit the words or the situation. The present study follows the principle that gesture is similar to some aspects of speech, particularly prosody and parts of the lexicon. Description of visual gesture articulation is therefore treated as a conservative extension of descriptions of vocal speech gesture articulation. Well-tried models of speech forms and functions are deployed, together with accounts from gesture studies from psychology to robotics. Evidence is taken from video data of story-telling in Ega, an African language, and in German, and the adequacy of descriptive and computational models of the forms and functions of speech is discussed, with a proposal for the formal modelling of speech-like timing of gesture articulators by means of Time Types in the Linear-Feature-Timing-Realtime (LFTR) model. Finally, an integrative model for combining visual and vocal gesture articulations into a comprehensive functional model of multimodal communication is proposed: the Rank Interpretation Model (RIM).
Naturalism Phonology (NP) has a history of opposition to abstractness, to generative linguistics, to formalist approaches, and differs from these in its strong focus on external rather than distributional, structural evidential domains. But evidence domains are orthogonal to empirical and formal methods, and, like formalist theories such as Optimality Theory (OT), the pedigree of NP includes structuralist and generative phonology. In an analysis which is sympathetic to both NP and OT, this contribution examines the relation between NP and OT, analyses a classic OT case study of syllabification in Tashlhiyt Berber, and presents computational linguistic analyses of this case, as well as of English syllable phonotactics and of tone language tonotactics. The contribution advocates an opening towards these methods, and the adoption of explicit, consistent, precise, complete and sound formal criteria for theories, which enable an exact interpretation in terms of operational models and computational implementations, and practical applications. The general frame of reference is a the Ecological Cycle in theory formation, from clarification of the domain through theory construction, interpretation with a model, evaluation and application in the original evidential domain, with payback to the language community from which the evidence was gained.
The present study is concerned with developing a speech synthesis subcomponent for perception testing in the context of evaluating cochlear implants in children. We provide a detailed requirements analysis, and develop a strategy for maximally high quality speech synthesis using Close Copy Speech synthesis techniques with a diphone based speech synthesiser, MBROLA. The close copy concept used in this work defines close copy as a function from a pair of speech signal recording and a phonemic annotation aligned with the recording into the pronunciation specification interface of the speech synthesiser. The design procedure has three phases: Manual Close Copy Speech (MCCS) synthesis as a ?best case gold standard?, in which the function is implemented manually as a preliminary step; Automatic Close Copy Speech (ACCS) synthesis, in which the steps taken in manual transformation are emulated by software; finally, Parametric Close Copy Speech (PCCS) synthesis, in which prosodic parameters are modifiable while retaining the diphones. This contribution reports on the MCCS and ACCS synthesis phases.
The study of speech timing, i.e. the duration and speed or tempo of speech events, has increased in importance over the past twenty years, in particular in connection with increased demands for accuracy, intelligibility and naturalness in speech technology, with applications in language teaching and testing, and with the study of speech timing patterns in language typology. H owever, the methods used in such studies are very diverse, and so far there is no accessible overview of these methods. Since the field is too broad for us to provide an exhaustive account, we have made two choices: first, to provide a framework of paradigmatic (classificatory), syntagmatic (compositional) and functional (discourse-oriented) dimensions for duration analysis; and second, to provide worked examples of a selection of methods associated primarily with these three dimensions. Some of the methods which are covered are established state-of-the-art approaches (e.g. the paradigmatic Classification and Regression Trees, CART , analysis), others are discussed in a critical light (e.g. so-called ‘rhythm metrics’). A set of syntagmatic approaches applies to the tokenisation and tree parsing of duration hierarchies, based on speech annotations, and a functional approach describes duration distributions with sociolinguistic variables. Several of the methods are supported by a new web-based software tool for analysing annotated speech data, the Time Group Analyser.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.