Interdyscyplinarne Centrum Przetwarzania Mowy i Języka C S L P

Interdyscyplinarne Centrum Przetwarzania Mowy i Języka C S L P

Interdyscyplinarne Centrum
Przetwarzania Mowy i Języka
C S L P
Center for Speech and Language Processing
School of English
al. Niepodległości 4
61-874 Poznań
Poland
phone +48 61 829 35 06, 829 35 21
fax +48 61 852 31 03
e-mail: [email protected]
“Constraints on tem poral structure in speech:
A pproaches and m ethods”
Dafydd Gibbon, Universität Bielefeld
Friday 25 November 2005
12:30
Instytut Filologii Angielskiej
Collegium Novum, al. Niepodległości 4, Room 601 A
The temporal structure of speech is based on a highly complex system of interacting components
at all levels, from phonetic production and perception process through structural levels to the
level of discourse patterning. From the phonetic point of view, the focus has very often been
either on contrastive duration at the segmental level, or on the issue of prosodic isochrony, equal
timing, of syllables or feet. The debate has been revived in the past 5 years or so with notable
contributions from several kinds of source: first, variance based approaches in phonetics and
experimental psycholinguistics, by Grabe and associates, and by Ramus and associates; second,
dynamic oscillatory and automaton based approaches in computer science by Barbosa, Cummins,
and Wachsmuth; third, linguistic approaches in natural and functional phonology by Dziubalska
and by Schlueter. Older phonology-phonetic interface approaches by Jassem and by Campbell
have also been re-discovered in recent years.
The presentation addresses the problem of evaluating approaches to speech timing,
focusing partially on rhythm, and scrutinises existing phonetic and psycholinguistic approaches in
respect of their potential for application in computational phonetics for the analysis of large
corpora of phonetic annotations of speech signals.
Finally a computational method for analysing temporal structures in speech is presented,
and strategies are discussed for decomposing the complex structures produced by this method
into plausible modular timing factors.