TR-IT-0115 :May, 1995 ( Internal Use )

Mary E. Beckman

Laryngeal Correlates of Local and Global Vocal Prominence

Abstract:This paper describes three speech databases that were collected in collaboration with colleagues in ATR-ITL and ATR-HIP. Each database includes one or more other signals recorded synchronously with the audio - ranging from non-invasive laryngograph trace to muscle activity level measured from subcutaneous electrodes. The corpora were designed to explore laryngeal correlates of prominence relationships in English at several levels, from relative overall loudness of the utterance as a whole to relative stress of a syllable within a word. In between these two sizes of unit, are prominence relationships for different words within a phrase or for different phrases within the utterance. Studying these intermediate levels is complicated because, in most languages, increased prominence can raise the average voice fundamental frequency over the word or phrase, but raised pitch is also a reliable effect of increased vocal effort over a whole utterance. In languages such as English, studying these phenomena of word-level or phrase-level prominence relationships is further complicated because of the way that they interact with the syllable-level prominence relationships, which are less directly related to pitch raising than in Japanese. The three databases were designed to address questions at each of these levels. For each database, I will outline the background issue and (where available) describe relevant analyses.