In earlier work, we have shown that articulation rate in Swedish child-directed speech (CDS) increases as a function of the age of the child, even when utterance length and differences in articulation rate between subjects are controlled for. In this paper we show on utterance level in spontaneous Swedish speech that i) for the youngest children, articulation rate in CDS is lower than in adult-directed speech (ADS), ii) there is a significant negative correlation between articulation rate and surprisal (the negative log probability) in ADS, and iii) the increase in articulation rate in Swedish CDS as a function of the age of the child holds, even when surprisal along with utterance length and differences in articulation rate between speakers are controlled for. These results indicate that adults adjust their articulation rate to make it fit the linguistic capacity of the child.
We ask three questions: 1) In adult-directed speech, is there a correlation between articulation rate and utterance length, on the one hand, and articulation rate and surprisal, on the other? 2) Is articulation rate in adult-directed speech higher than in child-directed speech, when controlling for utterance length, differences in articulation rate between speakers and surprisal? 3) Does the increase in articulation rate in child-directed speech as a function of child age shown in @cite_22 hold, even when controlling for surprisal?
@cite_22
2302707036 2056914870 179461371 2122189289
The speech rate and pitch (F0) characteristics of naturalistic, longitudinally recorded infant- and adult-directed speech are reported for three, genetically diverse languages. Previous research has suggested that the prosodic characteristics of infant-directed speech are slowed speech rate, raised mean pitch, and expanded pitch range relative to adult-directed speech. Sixteen mothers (5 Sri Lankan Tamil, 5 Tagalog, 6 Korean) were recorded in their homes during natural interactions with their young infants, and adults, over the course of 12 months beginning when the infant was 4 months old. Regression models indicated that the difference between infant- and adult-directed speech rates decreased across the first year of infants' development. Models of pitch revealed predicted differences between infant- and adult-directed speech but did not provide evidence for cross-linguistic or longitudinal effects within the time period investigated for the three languages. The universality of slowed speech rate, raised pitch, and expanded pitch range is discussed in light of individuals' highly variable implementation of these prosodic features in infant-directed speech. This paper presents several acoustic analyses carried out on read speech collected from Italian children aged from 7 to 13 years and North American children aged from 5 to 17 years. These analyses aimed at achieving a better understanding of spectral and temporal changes in speech produced by children of various ages in view of the development of automatic speech recognition applications. The results of these analyses confirm and complement the results reported in the literature, showing that characteristics of children's speech change with age and that spectral and temporal variability decrease as age increases. In fact, younger children show a substantially higher intra- and inter-speaker variability with respect to older children and adults. We investigated the use of several methods for speaker adaptive acoustic modeling to cope with inter-speaker spectral variability and to improve recognition performance for children. These methods proved to be effective in recognition of read speech with a vocabulary of about 11k words. This paper evaluates articulation rate measures and rate characteristics of read and spontaneous speech on the basis of a manually labelled database for German. The results of phone classification experiments for three different articulation rates only partially confirm our expectations. Phonetic explanations are suggested. Although still in experimental stage, articulation-based silent speech interfaces may have significant potential for facilitating oral communication in persons with voice and speech problems. An articulation-based silent speech interface converts articulatory movement information to audible words. The complexity of speech production mechanism (e.g., coarticulation) makes the conversion a formidable problem. In this paper, we reported a novel, real-time algorithm for recognizing words from continuous articulatory movements. This approach differed from prior work in that (1) it focused on word-level, rather than phoneme-level; (2) online segmentation and recognition were conducted at the same time; and (3) a symbolic representation (SAX) was used for data reduction in the original articulatory movement timeseries. A data set of 5,900 isolated word samples of tongue and lip movements was collected using electromagnetic articulograph from eleven English speakers. The average speaker-dependent recognition accuracy was up to 80.00 , with an average latency of 302 miliseconds for each word prediction. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach and its potential for building a real-time articulationbased silent speech interface for clinical applications. The across-speaker variation of the recognition accuracy was discussed.