INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Assessing Acoustic Reduction: Exploiting Local Structure in Speech

Louis ten Bosch (1), Annika Hämäläinen (2), Mirjam Ernestus (1)

(1) Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, The Netherlands
(2) Loquendo, Italy

This paper presents a method to quantify the spectral characteristics of reduction in speech. Hamalainen et al. (2009) proposes a measure of spectral reduction which is able to predict a substantial amount of the variation in duration that linguistically motivated variables do not account for. In this paper, we continue studying acoustic reduction in speech by developing a new acoustic measure of reduction, based on local manifold structure in speech. We show that this measure yields significantly improved statistical models for predicting variation in duration.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bosch, Louis ten / Hämäläinen, Annika / Ernestus, Mirjam (2011): "Assessing acoustic reduction: exploiting local structure in speech", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2665-2668.