The aim of this four-year project, started in September 1989, is to determine the ex- tent to which speakers can be distinguished on the basis of prosodic parameters. In this contribution, a description is given of the methodology and the scope of the project. In the research to be carried out different types of speech elicitation techniques will be used. Some of them aim at producing samples with controlled pitch contours, for the measurement of individual pitch movements. Less structured speech samples will be used for long-term prosodic measurements. A range of prosodic parameters will be extracted to span a multi-dimensional speakers' space. These will include mean FO, final FO, dec- lination, steepness of FO rises and falls, amount of pitch perturbation, speech rate, and voiced/unvoiced speech ratio.
The ways in which people speak depend on a number of factors, like e.g. communicative intent. We hope to find certain speaker-specific relationships between prosodic parameters that are relatively stable across different speech modes (e.g. read-out and spontaneous speech).
Results obtained so far are necessarily of a preliminary nature.
Cite as: Kraayeveld, J., Rietveld, A.C.M., Heuven, V.J.J.P.v. (1990) Prosodic speaker characteristics in Dutch. Proc. ESCA Workshop on Speaker Characterization in Speech Technology, 135-139
@inproceedings{kraayeveld90_scst,
author={J. Kraayeveld and A. C. M. Rietveld and Vincent J. J. P. van Heuven},
title={{Prosodic speaker characteristics in Dutch}},
year=1990,
booktitle={Proc. ESCA Workshop on Speaker Characterization in Speech Technology},
pages={135--139}
}