Using Speech Technology to Test Theories of Phonetic and Phonological Typology

Anisia Popescu, Lori Lamel, Ioana Vasilescu


Abstract
The present paper uses speech technology derived tools and methodologies to test theories about phonetic typology. We specifically look at how the two-way laryngeal contrast (voiced /b, d, g, v, z/ vs. voiceless /p, t, k, f, s/ obstruents) is implemented in European Portuguese, a language that has been suggested to exhibit a different voicing system than its sister Romance languages, more similar to the one found for Germanic languages. A large European Portuguese corpus was force aligned using (1) different combinations of parallel Portuguese (original), Italian (Romance language) and German (Germanic language) acoustic phone models and letting an ASR system choose the best fitting one, and (2) pronunciation variants (/b, d, g, v, z/ produced as either [b, d, g, v, z] or [p, t, k, f, s]) for obstruent consonants. Results support previous accounts in the literature that European Portuguese is diverging from the traditional voicing system known for Romance language, towards a hybrid system where stops and fricatives are specified for different voicing features.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1503
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
17321–17325
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1503
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anisia Popescu, Lori Lamel, and Ioana Vasilescu. 2024. Using Speech Technology to Test Theories of Phonetic and Phonological Typology. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17321–17325, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Using Speech Technology to Test Theories of Phonetic and Phonological Typology (Popescu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1503.pdf