The Centre for Speech Technology Research, The university of Edinburgh

PWorkshop: Semester 1, 2006–2007

03 Oct 2006

Tim Mills

Making sense of spectral tilt measurements

Spectral tilt refers to the overall shape of the source spectrum - how sharply the energy falls off in higher frequencies. Much recent work has looked at spectral tilt - many different researchers have presented many different ways of representing and measuring spectral tilt. This talk will present a critical survey of different methods with an eye to their relevance to the various areas of speech research spectral tilt is associated with.



17 Oct 2006

Matthew Aylett (CSTR and Cereproc)

Using Unit Selection Synthesis for Psycholinguistic Studies of Dialog and Phonetics: Bridging the Experimental and Corpus Paradigms


31 Oct 2006

Olga Gordeeva & Jim Scobbie (QMUC)

On the function of preaspirated voiceless fricatives in Scottish Standard English

Scottish English vowel-voiceless fricative sequences in CVC words are often produced with long in duration aspirated/whispered transitions. While early timing of glottal abduction relative to supralaryngeal constriction in vowels before voiceless fricatives is a cross-linguistic phonetic characteristic, the extent of this phenomenon in SSE is so large that it merits an investigation. Here we present some results on one potential function of such preaspiration, i.e. a correlate of phonological /VOICE/ of word-final fricatives.



07 Nov 2006

Sasha Calhoun

The Relationship between Prosodic and Information Structure: Evidence from a Corpus

Prosody is one of the most important means by which information structure, i.e. the salience and organisation of information in relation to a discourse model, is signalled in English. It has been standardly argued that information structure is primarily signalled by the distribution of pitch accents within syntax structure, as well as intonation event type. I argue that the relevant cases can be much better accounted for if we regard information structure as a strong probabilistic constraint on metrical prosodic structure. Both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Switchboard corpus is presented in support of this account.



17 Nov 2006

San Duanmu (University of Michigan)

TBC


21 Nov 2006

Mits Ota

Lexical representations of prosodic contrasts in infancy

Recent research suggests that infants' readiness to encode segmental contrasts in new words develops some time during the first half of the second year. But much less is known about when infants acquire a similar ability in prosodic lexical contrasts, how reliable early prosodic representations are, and how flexible they are with respect to post-lexical variability. Here I address these issues based on a series of word-object association experiments I have been conducting with 14- and 17-month-old Japanese infants.



28 Nov 2006

Evia Kainada

Influence of prosodic boundary strength on segmental and suprasegmental processes


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