A Cross-language Corpus for Studying the Phonetics and Phonology of Prominence

Bistra Andreeva, William Barry, Jacques Koreman


Abstract
The present article describes a corpus which was collected for the cross-language comparison of prominence. In the data analysis, the acoustic-phonetic properties of words spoken with two different levels of accentuation (de-accented and nuclear accented in non-contrastive narrow-focus) are examined in question-answer elicited sentences and iterative imitations (on the syllable ‘da’) produced by Bulgarian, Russian, French, German and Norwegian speakers (3 male and 3 female per language). Normalized parameter values allow a comparison of the properties employed in differentiating the two levels of accentuation. Across the five languages there are systematic differences in the degree to which duration, f0, intensity and spectral vowel definition change with changing prominence under different focus conditions. The link with phonological differences between the languages is discussed.
Anthology ID:
L14-1033
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
326–330
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1048_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bistra Andreeva, William Barry, and Jacques Koreman. 2014. A Cross-language Corpus for Studying the Phonetics and Phonology of Prominence. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 326–330, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Cross-language Corpus for Studying the Phonetics and Phonology of Prominence (Andreeva et al., LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1048_Paper.pdf