@inproceedings{popescu-etal-2024-using,
    title = "Using Speech Technology to Test Theories of Phonetic and Phonological Typology",
    author = "Popescu, Anisia  and
      Lamel, Lori  and
      Vasilescu, Ioana",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1503",
    pages = "17321--17325",
    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.",
}

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.
Popescu, Anisia Lamel, Lori Vasilescu, Ioana
Using Speech Technology to Test Theories of Phonetic and Phonological Typology