@article {339, title = {Audiovisual cues to a speaker{\textquoteright}s confidence level}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

I will present the results of a number of experiments on the role of audiovisual prosody for signalling and detecting meta-cognitive information in question-answering. The first study consists of an experiment in which participants are asked factual questions in a conversational setting, while they are being filmed. Statistical analyses bring to light that a speakers{\textquoteright} confidence level is cued by a number of visual and verbal properties. Interestingly, it appears that answers tend to have a higher number of marked auditive and visual feature settings, including divergences of the neutral facial expression, when a speaker{\textquoteright}s confidence level is low, while the reverse is true for non-answers. The second study is a perception experiment, in which a selection of the utterances from the first study is presented to participants in one of three conditions: vision only, sound only or vision+sound. Results reveal that human observers can reliably distinguish high confidence responses from low confidence responses in all three conditions, be it that answers are easier than non-answers, and that a bimodal presentation of the stimuli is easier than the unimodal counterparts. The talk will end with some perspectives on related work about difference in the expression of confidence level between speakers who differ in age and cultural background.

}, author = {Marc Swerts} } @article {340, title = {Automatic phonetic transcription of large speech corpora: a comparative study}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

In a recent study, we investigated whether automatic transcription procedures can approximate manually verified phonetic transcriptions typically delivered with contemporary large speech corpora. Ten automatic procedures were used to generate a broad phonetic transcription of well-prepared speech (read-aloud texts) and spontaneous speech (telephone dialogues) from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. The resulting transcriptions were compared to manually verified phonetic transcriptions from the same corpus.

We found that signal-based procedures could not approximate the manually verified phonetic transcriptions. A knowledge-based procedure did not give optimal results either. Quite surprisingly, a procedure in which a canonical transcription, through the use of decision trees and a small sample of manually verified phonetic transcriptions, was modelled towards the target transcription, performed best. The number and the nature of the remaining discrepancies compared to inter-labeller disagreements reported in the literature. This implies that future corpus designers should consider the use of automatic transcription procedures as a valid and cheap alternative to expensive human experts.

}, author = {Christophe Van Bael} } @article {190, title = {Automatische emotie-detectie in spraak in het project MultimediaN: Multi-Modal Interaction}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Binnen het project MultimediaN Multi-Modal Interaction doen we o.a. onderzoek naar het automatisch detecteren van emotie in spraak. De laatste jaren wordt er steeds meer gewerkt aan het automatisch detecteren van emotie in spraak, ofwel gezicht, ofwel gebaren en daarbij komt men vaak dezelfde knelpunten tegen. Dit is een van de redenen waarom wij zijn begonnen met het detecteren van gelach. In deze presentatie zal ik iets meer vertellen over de moeilijkheden die gepaard gaan met dit soort emotie onderzoek; hoe komen we aan spontane emotionele spraak data, hoe gaan we emotie annoteren etc. Verder is het van belang dat de classificatie/detectie experimenten goed opgezet worden (classificatie vs. detectie) en dat de ontwikkelde emotie detectoren ook goed ge{\"e}valueerd kunnen worden. Ook zal ik ingaan op een aantal emotie detectie experimenten die we hebben uitgevoerd op een database en wat we van plan zijn om te gaan doen binnen het project.

}, author = {Khiet Truong} } @article {185, title = {E-learning resource {\textquoteright}Russian Dialectal Phonetics{\textquoteright}: Perspectives and first output}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

The aim of the project supported by NWO is to create an electronic course of modern Russian dialectal phonetics suitable for learning, teaching and for scientific research. The course will comprise two components: a theoretical overview and a practical section (real texts and on-line tests, exercises, quizzes). The information provided to users is a multimedia one: original dialectal texts and their phonations, multimedia sensitive maps and photo- and video-fragments from the archive of dialectological expeditions with exercises in the practical section. All course units are constructed as SCORM-consistent reusable learning objects (RLOs). As an open-source product, the electronic course "Russian Dialectal Phonetics" can be enlarged and outspread to other levels of linguistic description of Russian dialects.

In my paper, after a short discussion of the multimedia course, I will present some results of our study on some Southern Russian dialects which are characterised by so called {\textquotedblleft}dissimilative akan{\textquoteright}je{\textquotedblright} (DA) - a specific type of vowel neutralization in pretonic syllables where the result of neutralization depends on the quality of the stressed vowel. We believe that originally DA showed compensatory dissimilation within the prosodic nucleus on the basis of vowel length: the longer (more open) the stressed vowel, the shorter (more reduced) the pretonic one. The qualitative and quantitative difference between long and short pretonic vowels [a] and [ə] in all so far known dialects with DA is striking, and there is an abrupt change from one vowel to another. While processing some texts with DA during our work on the project, previously supposed to show the so-called Prokhor or Don type of DA ([a] before high stressed vowels and [ə] before all non-high ones), we found a completely different situation: qualitative and quantitative differences of pretonic vowels depending on the stressed vowel are small, gradual and irrelevant. It can be suggested that this dialect reflects the most archaic type of DA with a vague dependence of the pretonic vowel on the length of the stressed vowel, which has not yet been fixed in the phonological system. This type of DA can be called protodissimilative.

}, author = {Sergej Kniazev} } @article {342, title = {Example-based large vocabulary recognition}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Hidden Markov Models(HMM) have dominated speech recognition for over two decades. HMMs are an embeddiment of a beads on a string model in which a sentence is a sequence of words, a word a sequence of phonemes and a phoneme a sequence of states. An HMM-state (in the acoustic model) models a sub-phonetic speech fragment as a short-time stationary event. HMMs have great advantages: the concept is straightforward and the parameters in the model are trained from data available in large databases. Moreover HMMs have proven to be extremely scaleable: larger database allow for more detailed models with more parameters while more powerful CPUs make it possible to use these more detailed models in real-time systems. The success of HMMs has been the single most important driving force in the use of large databases and statistical techniques in the field of speech and language.

Nevertheless HMMs are far from ideal in their speech modeling concept. Especially the short-time stationarity assumption is contradictory to the nature of speech which often looks more like a concatenation of transients than a concatenation of stationary segments. In order to overcome these fundamental weaknesses a new line of speeech recognition systems is currently being developed that avoids the modeling step all together and does recognition straight from the data by the application of template matching. This avoids the step of imperfect modeling and at the same time itis in line with recent psycholinguistic findings that claim that many individual traces of speech fragments are permanently stored in memory.

Template based systems require that the full database is accessible at recognition time; which thanks to further increases in hardware performance is almost within reach. However, template based recognition has fundamental weaknesses as well: it relies on the score of one or a few examples only to compute a distance score.

In this presentation we will compare the pro{\textquoteright}s and con{\textquoteright}s of HMM and template based recognition. Both of the them could not exist without the availability of large corpora of speech. However, the way in which these corpora are used in an actual recognition system are drastically different for both methods.

}, author = {Dirk Van Compernolle} } @article {180, title = {Gevarieerde, natuurlijke intonatie voor difoonsynthese}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Tekst-naar-spraaksoftware die gebaseerd is op unit-selectie heeft als belangrijk voordeel dat de prosodie voldoende gevarieerd is. Die is immers direct afkomstig uit spraak van een menselijke spreker. Regelgebaseerde systemen kunnen in vergelijking hiermee wel wat {\textquoteright}houterig{\textquoteright} klinken: de regels produceren elke keer hetzelfde deuntje. Het is echter geen kwestie van alles of niets. Ook in klassieke difoonsynthese kan voor de beregeling van duur en melodie gespiekt worden bij een echte spreker. In deze lezing bespreek ik een recente - en nog enigszins experimentele - toevoeging aan de tekst-naar-spraaksoftware van Fluency, die, waar mogelijk, een zin of deelzin voorziet van een passende melodie uit een corpus van natuurlijke spraak.

}, author = {Arthur Dirksen} } @article {182, title = {How do alaryngeal speakers convey glottal stops?}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

To convey glottal stops, laryngeal speakers control the degree of constriction at the larynx. Laryngectomy {\textendash} usually necessitated by laryngeal cancer {\textendash} involves surgical removal of the larynx. The new voice source (neo-glottis) is formed by the mucosa and muscles situated at the entrance to the esophagus (foodpipe). Control over the neo-glottis in these tracheo-esophageal (TE) speakers, might influence attempts to convey glottal stops accurately. This study investigated how TE speakers realize glottal stops in abutting words that end and begin with the same vowel. Acoustic analyses showed that TE speakers use different strategies, most notably the insertion of glides (/w/; /j/). Listeners rated the TE speakers{\textquoteright} attempts to convey {\textquoteleft}glottal{\textquoteright} stops less favourably than the control speakers{\textquoteright} glottal stops. The TE speakers{\textquoteright} acoustic realizations that deviated most from what would normally be expected, received the least favourable ratings.

}, author = {Maya van Rossum} } @article {186, title = {Identifying Linguistic Structure in the Aggregate Analysis of Dialect Pronunciation}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Computational dialectometry is a multidisciplinary field that uses quantitative methods in order to measure linguistic differences between the dialects. The distances between the dialects are measured at different levels (phonetic, lexical, syntactic) by aggregating over the entire data set. These aggregate analyses do not expose the underlying linguistic structure, i.e. the specific linguistic elements that contributed to the differences between the dialects. The aim of the work presented here is to extract the linguistic structure from the aggregate analysis of Bulgarian dialects carried out on the basis of word pronunciations. The method is based on the identification of regular sound correspondences and is for the first time applied in dialectometry in order to extract linguistic structure from the aggregate analysis. All the analyses are based on the transcriptions of 117 words collected from 84 sites equally distributed over the Bulgarian dialect area. The results have shown that identification of regular sound correspondences can be successfully applied in the task of identifying linguistic structure in the aggregate analysis of dialects based on word pronunciation.

}, author = {Jelena Prokic} } @article {177, title = {Iets over rhythme en timing in NL en GB}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Mijn definitie van rhythme luidt: het {\textquoteleft}rappen{\textquoteright}, binnen een psychologisch/neurologisch praesens van {\textpm} 2-5 seconden, van motorische eenheden (h.l. syllabes) in (hierarchie{\"e}n van) MOON, TROchee, jamBOS, (+)DACtylus, (+)amPHIbrach(+) en anaPEST(+).

(De + eveneens zwakke syllabe aanduidend, komt dit neer op 11 mogelijke {\textquoteleft}voeten{\textquoteright}. {\textquoteleft}RAPpen{\textquoteright} = groeperen in overeenstemming met een Rhythmisch Alternatie Principe inhoudende: niet meer dan 2 zwakkeren tussen Sterkeren en niet meer dan 1 aan begin en eind van locutie).

Deze theorie laat zich voor GB illustreren in (1), voor NL in (2): zelfde scandering (maar andere timing).

(1) the secretary for education was at the front door, not in the living-room.

(2) het vreselijkste gesodemieter was met de m.e., niet met de kleuterjuf.

Vervolgens de vraag hoe de beschrijving voor GB/NL te voltooien.

Eerdere pogingen tot beantwoording van deze vraag o.m. in hfdst. 8 van mijn Indispensable Foundation (1990), afscheidscollege (2000), artikelen in Festschrift Barentsen (ed. Honselaar e.a.) (2003) en Lacus Forum (2004/5/6).

}, author = {Lucas van Buuren} } @article {188, title = {JASMIN-CGN: Uitbreiding van het CGN met spraak van Jongeren, Anderstaligen en Senioren}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Large speech corpora constitute an indispensable resource for conducting research in speech processing and for developing real-life speech applications. In 2004 the Spoken Dutch Corpus (Corpus Gesproken Nederlands {\textendash} CGN: a corpus of standard Dutch as spoken by adult natives in the Netherlands and Flanders) became available. Owing to budget constraints, CGN does not include speech of children, non-natives, elderly people and recordings of speech produced in human-machine interactions. Since such recordings would be extremely useful for conducting research and for developing HLT applications for these specific groups of speakers of Dutch, a project was started to extend CGN by collecting a corpus of contemporary Dutch as spoken by children of different age groups, non-natives with different mother tongues and elderly people in the Netherlands and Flanders (JASMIN-CGN). In addition, in this project speech material will be collected in a communication setting that was not envisaged in CGN: human-machine interaction. One third of the data will be collected in Flanders and two thirds in the Netherlands. In this talk I will discuss the rationale of the project, the corpus design, the speech material, the procedure and the use that can be made of the results of this project.

}, author = {Olga van Herwijnen and Catia Cucchiarini} } @article {189, title = {"Landgenooten..." Verbeterde toegang tot historische toespraken}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Het CHoral project heeft tot doel om technologie te ontwikkelen ter verbetering van de toegang tot historische audiocollecties. Via spraakherkenning proberen we audio-archieven om te zetten in tekst, waardoor het mogelijk wordt om de audio te doorzoeken op woordniveau. Relevante fragmenten kunnen vervolgens direct worden beluisterd. Het automatisch verwerken van historische gesproken documenten is lastig, omdat de audiokwaliteit vaak slecht is, en de spreekstijl en het woordgebruik ouderwets zijn. Dit leidt tot een mismatch met bestaande akoestische modellen en taalmodellen, die zijn ontwikkeld op het nieuwsdomein.

In deze presentatie willen we ons onderzoek introduceren aan de hand van experimenten op een specifieke, historische audiocollectie: de toespraken van Koningin Wilhelmina uitgezonden op Radio Oranje tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deze collectie bestaat niet alleen uit audio; alle toespraken zijn tevens volledig uitgeschreven. Daarom was het mogelijk om door oplijning van de audio met de teksten tot een index op woordniveau te komen. In een demo zullen we laten zien dat - met behulp van deze index - online gezocht kan worden in de audio en de tekst als ondertiteling bij de audio kan worden gepresenteerd.

}, author = {Willemijn Heeren and Laurens van der Werff} } @article {344, title = {Methodologies for improving the g2p conversion of Dutch names}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Names pose particular problems for grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) converters. This is due to their non-standard orthography caused by foreign origin or fossilisation of older spelling forms. In the Autonomata project a variety of techniques is studied to improve the g2p conversion of Dutch names, more specifically: first names, second names, street names and town names. In Autonomata, a standard g2p converter is augmented with a name-specific phoneme-to-phoneme (p2p) converter that captures the peculiarities of names. Based on large collections of names with a manually verified phonetic transcription, the p2p is trained with the specific information it requires. Various inductive and deductive approaches are studied to achive this goal. We will exemplify our approach by showing results on the g2p of Dutch first names.

Autonomata is carried out in the framework of the STEVIN-programme.

Partners in the project are the Radboud University Nijmegen, Ghent University, Utrecht University, Nuance, and TeleAtlas.

}, author = {Henk van den Heuvel} } @article {338, title = {Modified repeats: one method for asserting primary rights from second position}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

This presentation examines one practice speakers have for confirming when confirmation was not otherwise relevant. The data are a collection taken from video and audio recordings of spontaneous face-to-face and telephone conversations between family members and friends. The practice I analyze here involves a speaker repeating an assertion previously made by another speaker in modified form with stress on the copula/auxiliary. It is argued that these modified repeats work to undermine the first speaker{\textquoteright}s default ownership and rights over the claim being made and instead assert the primacy of the second speaker{\textquoteright}s rights to make the statement.

Two types of modified repeats are identified: partial and full. Though both involve competing for primacy of the claim, they occur in distinct sequential environments: the former are generally positioned after a first claim was epistemically downgraded whereas the latter are positioned following initial claims that were offered straightforwardly, without downgrading.

}, author = {Tanya Stivers} } @article {341, title = {Morphological information and acoustic duration in Dutch compounds}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Recent literature demonstrates that articulatory salience in speech (e.g. acoustic duration and loudness) is sensitive to the amount of information carried by phonemes, syllables and words. The more predictable (i.e. less informative) a linguistic unit is in its lexical or phonological environment, the less salient its realization. Examples of this phenomenon, especially common in spontaneous speech, include acoustic reduction of highly frequent functional words, durational shortening or deletion of predictable discourse markers, and longer articulation of phonemes with higher contribution to word recognition.

We tested whether the amount of information supplied by morphological units adds to other (phonetic, prosodic and lexical) domains of predictability and modulates the acoustic duration of affixes. This research focused on the interfixes -s- or -e(n)- in Dutch compounds. The selection of the interfix is not determined by rules, but depends on probabilistic characteristics of the left and right constituent families (sets of compounds sharing the left/right constituent with the target). The goal was then to detect the impact of families in the interfix articulation.

The study was based on two datasets collected from the "Library of the Blind" component of the Spoken Dutch Corpus: 1156 tokens containing the interfix -s- and 787 tokens containing the interfix -e(n)-. The dependent variables of the study were acoustic durations of the interfixes, and, for the interfix -e(n)-, the number of segments in the interfix. The acoustic duration of phonemes was determined with the help of an ASR, while the presence of [n] in the interfix was established by two phoneticians. We report the correlation of acoustic salience of the interfix and the amount of information in both positional families, as well as the distribution of interfixes in the left family. Moreover, we demonstrate that a number of durational effects induced by phonetic and prosodic factors and so far only observed under laboratory conditions is also found in the genre of lively read aloud speech.

}, author = {Victor Kuperman} } @article {343, title = {Multimedia retrieval}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

The number of digital multimedia collections is growing rapidly. Due to the ever declining costs of recording audio and video, and due to improved preservation technology, huge data sets containing text, audio, video and images are created, both by professionals and non-professionals.

The reasons for building up these collections may vary. Organisations such as broadcast companies consider the production and publishing of multimedia data as their core business. Within these companies there is a tendency to search for "means" to get more out the produced content: a nice example is the added basic search functionality in the "uitzending gemist" collection. Other organisations are merely interested in obtaining insight in the internal information flow, for internal (corporate meetings that are recorded) or public use (council meetings that are recorded and webcasted). A number of organisations in the Netherlands administer spoken-word archives: recordings of spoken interviews and testimonies on diverging topics such as retrospective narratives, eye witness reports and historical site descriptions. Modern variants of these spoken-word archives are archives of {\textquoteright}Podcasts{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteright}Vodcasts{\textquoteright} (video podcasts) and {\textquoteright}Vlogs{\textquoteright} (video weblog), created in order to share {\textquoteright}home-made{\textquoteright} information with "the world".

The Human Media Interaction (HMI) group is set within the computer science department and the Centre of Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) and has a long history in multimedia retrieval research. Especially the use of audio mining and speech recognition technology in multimedia retrieval (SDR or spoken document retrieval) is an important research focus.

The presentation is focussed on the possibility to index and access spoken archives via the use of automatic speech recognition technology. The index, based on the imperfect recognition results is then used to search the document collection and relate individual documents to other information sources in (potentially) any media format. We will discuss the running demo application in which the recognised speech of the 8 o{\textquoteright}clock news is used to connect news items with 5 (most) similar newspaper documents from the Twente News Corpus.

}, author = {Arjan van Hessen} } @article {184, title = {Noord-Russische vraagintonatie: Een brede hoed voor brede focus?}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Hoewel de Russische dialecten in verhouding weinig van elkaar verschillen, is de onderlinge variatie op het gebied van de prosodie aanmerkelijk. Een opvallend intonationeel verschil tussen het Standaard-Russisch en het Noord-Russische dialect van Varzoega, een dorpje aan de Witte Zee is een "brede hoed"-patroon in ja/nee-vragen in het dialect. Waar in het Standaard-Russisch de toonhoogte onmiddellijk na de geaccentueerde lettergreep aan een sterke daling begint - LH*L volgens Od{\'e}{\textquoteright}s ToRI (Transcription of Russian Intonation) - kent dit dialect, naast ditzelfde patroon, de mogelijkheid om de daling pas te beginnen na de beklemtoonde syllabe van het laatste woord van de uiting. De eerste analyses doen vermoeden dat dit onderscheid in het dialect bepaald wordt door een verschil in focusdomein. Dit zou betekenen dat sprekers van dit dialect, in tegenstelling tot sprekers van het Standaard-Russisch, in vraagzinnen eenduidig het verschil aan kunnen geven tussen brede en nauwe focus.

}, author = {Margje Post} } @article {178, title = {Over het perceptieve belang van prosodie bij oude en jonge luisteraars}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

In een eerdere bijdrage (Dag van de Fonetiek 2003) heb ik laten zien dat een regelmatige {\textquoteright}timing{\textquoteright} van woorden in een woordenlijst leidt tot snellere reactietijden in een foneem-detectie-taak. Temporele regelmaat maakt blijkbaar dat luisteraars de gesproken woorden sneller kunnen herkennen. Dat eerdere onderzoek was uitgevoerd met jong-volwassen luisteraars. We voorspellen dat het perceptieve belang van (temporele) prosodie voor oudere luisteraars nog groter is dan voor jongeren, ter compensatie van auditieve en cognitieve handicaps bij eerstgenoemden. Een herhaling van een eerder experiment, nu met oudere luisteraars, toont wisselende resultaten. Temporele regelmaat heeft alleen effect bij jambische woorden, en niet bij trochee{\"e}n. Oudere luisteraars lijken dus meer gevoelig voor de metrische structuur van het doelwoord zelf, dan voor de al dan niet regelmatige timing van de woorden in een lijst.

}, author = {Hugo Quen{\'e}} } @article {179, title = {Prominent Words as Anchors for TRP Projection}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Het effect van het laatste geaccentueerde woord van een uiting op de projectie van (potentiele) beurtwisselingsmomenten (TRPs) is onderzocht met twee reactietijd experimenten. Proefpersonen werd gevraagd met minimale responsen te reageren op vooraf opgenomen dialogen en gemanipuleerde, verarmde versies van deze dialogen. De eerste manipulatie, de {\textquoteright}gehumde{\textquoteright} stimulusvariant, bevatte enkel intonatie en timing informatie. In de tweede manupulatie, de {\textquoteright}gefluisterde{\textquoteright} stimulusvariant, ontbrak juist alle periodische informatie. De distributie van de reactietijden van deze uitgelokte responsen was vergelijkbaar met die van natuurlijke beurtwisselingen. Het bleek dat de aanwezigheid van niet prominente woorden voor een uiting-einde de timing van zowel de natuurlijke als de uitgelokte responsen versnelt, zelfs in de {\textquoteright}gefluisterde{\textquoteright} versie. Dit suggereert dat met de aanwezigheid van een prominent, informatief woord de projectie van een opkomend uitingseinde begint. De aanwezigheid van niet prominente, voorspelbare spraak helpt de luisteraars vervolgens om hun voorspelling van het uitingseinde exact te timen.

}, author = {Wieneke Wesseling and Rob van Son} } @article {183, title = {Spoken word processing and the effect of phonemic mismatch in aphasia and dyslexia}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Initial lexical activation in typical populations is a direct reflection of the goodness of fit between the presented stimulus and the intended target. In this study, lexical activation was investigated upon presentation of polysyllabic pseudowords (such as procodile) for two atypical populations: aphasic and dyslexic adults. Results of an auditory lexical decision task supported the hypothesis that sensitivity to phonemic mismatch was lower in both atypical populations, compared to their respective control groups. However, whereas the dyslexic participants were outperformed by their controls only for minimal word-initial mismatches, lexical decision accuracy of the aphasic participants was lower across the board. Both atypical groups were affected by the acoustic/perceptual difference between the changed and canonical word form. The results are discussed in terms of lexical access and the role of verbal working memory.

}, author = {Esther Janse and Elise de Bree and Susanne Brouwer} } @article {181, title = {Stemhebbend-stemloosheid in Nederlandse tracheoesofageale sprekers}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

Bij keelkanker is een totale laryngectomie vaak de laatste kans. Deze operatie verandert de anatomie en fysiologie van het spraakkanaal drastisch. Door de introductie van de stemprothese is de verstaanbaarheid van deze patienten verrassend goed, maar het is nog steeds veel slechter dan bij normale spraak. Een van de meest voorkomende problemen is de verwarring tussen stemhebbende en stemloze plosieven en fricatieven. Het is interessant te weten welke akoestische cues sprekers gebruiken die wel een correct onderscheid maken en of deze cues verschillen van normale sprekers. Daarom hebben wij metingen verricht in Praat op de goed waargenomen plosieven en fricatieven, waarbij we oa hebben gekeken naar lengte van de klinkers, sluitingsduur, burst en fonatie offset na een klinker. Eerste resultaten laten een verschil zien tussen labiale en alveolaire plosieven en het feit dat patienten meer cues gebruiken dan normale sprekers. Ook lange fonatie offset lijkt een probleem. Patienten lijken secundaire cues te gebruiken als compensatie voor de verminderde controle over hun {\textquoteleft}neoglottis{\textquoteright}.

}, author = {Petra Jongmans} } @article {345, title = {Text-Induced spelling correction}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Nijmegen, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

In this talk we present an overview of our PhD-work on Text-Induced Spelling Correction. The work presents a novel approximate string matching algorithm for indexed text search. The algorithm is based on a hashing function which uniquely identifies strings composed of the same subsets of characters, i.e. anagrams, by means of a numeric value. The numeric value allows for searching for character strings differing from a particular string by a predefined number of characters. This forms an ideal basis for a novel spelling error detection and correction algorithm, which we call Text-Induced Spelling Correction or TISC. Our system uses nothing but lexical and word cooccurrence information derived from a corpus, a very large collection of texts in a particular language, to perform context-sensitive spelling error correction of non-words. Non-words are word strings produced unintentionally by a typist that deviate from a convention about how words are to be spelled in order to be considered real-words within the language. We will highlight the differences between our character-based similarity key and the language specific similarity keys as employed in, for instance, the well-known Soundex and Phonix phonetic spelling systems. The spelling error detection and correction mechanism we propose uses not only isolated word information, but also context information. It performs context-sensitive error correction by deriving useful knowledge from the text to be spelling checked. This enables our system to correct typos for which it does not have the correct word in its dictionary. Apart from this, some typos are ambiguous in that they may resolve into two or more different words. We investigate in depth the relationship between a typo and its context and propose a new algorithm for ranking correction candidates that specifically makes use of the typo{\textquoteright}s context.

We further discuss the tension between the wish of developers of spelling correction systems of catering for phonetic spelling errors and the cost of this in terms of the system{\textquoteright}s precision. Extensive evaluations on both English and Dutch allow us to illustrate this by discussing the performance of Aspell and the Microsoft Proofing Tools in this regard.

}, author = {Martin Reynaert} } @article {187, title = {Vowel pronunciation in Swedish dialects}, year = {2006}, publisher = {Nederlandse Vereniging voor Fonetische Wetenschappen}, address = {Utrecht, The Netherlands}, abstract = {

At the University of Groningen computational methods are used to measure dialect distances and classify dialects. In my PhD-project the focus will be on pronunciation of vowels in Swedish dialects. The data comes from 105 Swedish sites with 12 speakers from each site. The speakers represent 4 groups: elderly women, elderly men, young women and young men. The data exist both as acoustic files and transcriptions, and both will be used for analyses. One aim is to analyse the transcriptions using different feature systems, since the feature systems used so far in Groningen have not led to an improve ment of the results compared to a simple phone representation. The relationship between acoustics and transcriptions will be analysed as well as the relationships between the 4 speaker groups. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling are used for classifying the dialects and results are shown on dialect maps.

}, author = {Therese Leinonen} }