C1: Information Density and the Predictability of Phonetic Structure

Project C1 addresses the relation between information density and linguistic encoding in phonetics and human speech processing. In the second funding period, an elaborate account of the prosodic hierarchy and its interaction with the ID profile of utterances will be implemented. The project will also investigate effects of channel characteristics and audience design on production and perception. With respect to methodology, the project will develop a procedure for evaluating the contribution of phonetic features to the informativity of linguistic units and investigate the combination of language models across different linguistic levels.

Publications

2020

Raveh, Eran; Twig, Maya; Möbius, Bernd; Zehavi, Oded

Prosodic alignments in shadowed singing of familiar and novel music Inproceedings

Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020, Tokyo, Japan, 2020.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Werner, Raphael; Trouvain, Jürgen; Möbius, Bernd

Ein sprachübergreifender Vergleich des Pausenverhaltens natürlicher Sprecher in verschiedenen Sprechtempi mit TTS-Systemen Inproceedings

Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2020, Tagungsband der 31. Konferenz , pp. 101-108, TUD Press, Magdeburg, 2020.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Andreeva, Bistra; Möbius, Bernd; Whang, James

Effects of surprisal and boundary strength on phrase-final lengthening Inproceedings

Proc. 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020, pp. 146-150, 2020.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Meier, David; Andreeva, Bistra

Einflussfaktoren auf die Wahrnehmung von Prominenz im natürlichen Dialog Inproceedings

Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2020, Tagungsband der 31. Konferenz , pp. 257-264, Magdeburg, 2020.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

@inproceedings{Meier2020,
title = {Einflussfaktoren auf die Wahrnehmung von Prominenz im nat\"{u}rlichen Dialog},
author = {David Meier and Bistra Andreeva},
url = {http://www.essv.de/?year=2020
http://www.essv.de/pdf/2020_257_264.pdf},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-00-00},
booktitle = {Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2020, Tagungsband der 31. Konferenz
},
pages = {257-264},
address = {Magdeburg},
abstract = {Turnbull et al. [1] stellen fest, dass sich auf die Wahrnehmung der prosodischen Prominenz von isolierten Adjektiv-Nomen-Paaren mehrere konkurrierende Faktoren auswirken, n\"{a}mlich die Phonologie, der Diskurskontext und das Wissen \"{u}ber den Diskurs. Der vorliegende Beitrag hat das Ziel, den relativen Einfluss der evozierten Fokussierung (eng kontrastiv vs. weit kontrastiv) und der Akzentuierung (akzentuiert vs. nicht akzentuiert) auf die Wahrnehmung von Prominenz zu untersuchen und zu \"{u}berpr\"{u}fen, ob die in Turnbull et al. vorgestellten Konzepte in einer Umgebung reproduzierbar sind, die eher mit einem nat\"{u}rlichsprachlichen Dialog vergleichbar ist. F\"{u}r die Studie wurden 144 realisierte S\"{a}tze eines einzelnen m\"{a}nnlichen Sprechers so zusammengeschnitten, dass ein semantischer Kontrast entweder auf dem betreffenden Nomen oder auf dem Adjektiv entsteht. Die metrisch starken Silben des Adjektivs oder des Nomens waren entweder entsprechend der Fokusstruktur oder gegen Erwartung akzentuiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Akzentuierung einen gr\"{o}{\ss}eren Einfluss auf die Prominenzwahrnehmung als die Fokusbedingung hat, was im Einklang mit den Ergebnissen von Turnbull et al. ist. Adjektive werden zudem konsequent als prominenter eingestuft als Nomen in vergleichbaren Kontexten. Eine Erweiterung des Diskurskontextes und der Hintergrundinformationen, die dem Versuchsteilnehmer zur Verf\"{u}gung standen, haben in dem hier vorgestellten Versuchsaufbau allerdings nur vernachl\"{a}ssigbare Effekte.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}

Gessinger, Iona; Möbius, Bernd; Andreeva, Bistra; Raveh, Eran; Steiner, Ingmar

Phonetic accommodation of L2 German speakers to the virtual language learning tutor Mirabella Inproceedings

Proceedings of Interspeech 2020, pp. 4118-4122, Shanghai, China , 2020.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

2019

Brandt, Erika; Andreeva, Bistra; Möbius, Bernd

Information density and vowel dispersion in the productions of Bulgarian L2 speakers of German Inproceedings

Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), pp. 3165-3169, Melbourne, 2019.

Links | BibTeX

Whang, James

Effects of phonotactic predictability on sensitivity to phonetic detail Journal Article

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, 10(1):8 , pp. 1-28, 2019.

Links | BibTeX

Brandt, Erika

Information density and phonetic structure : explaining segmental variability PhD Thesis

Saarland University, 2019.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

@phdthesis{Brandt_diss_2019,
title = {Information density and phonetic structure : explaining segmental variability},
author = {Erika Brandt},
editor = {Bernd M\"{o}bius [Akademische Betreuung]},
url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:291--ds-279181},
doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.22028/D291-27918},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-00-00},
address = {Saarbr\"{u}cken},
school = {Saarland University},
abstract = {There is growing evidence that information-theoretic principles influence linguistic structures. Regarding speech several studies have found that phonetic structures lengthen in duration and strengthen in their spectral features when they are difficult to predict from their context, whereas easily predictable phonetic structures are shortened and reduced spectrally. Most of this evidence comes from studies on American English, only some studies have shown similar tendencies in Dutch, Finnish, or Russian. In this context, the Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis (Aylett and Turk 2004, Aylett and Turk 2006) emerged claiming that the effect of information-theoretic factors on the segmental structure is moderated through the prosodic structure. In this thesis, we investigate the impact and interaction of information density and prosodic structure on segmental variability in production analyses, mainly based on German read speech, and also listeners' perception of differences in phonetic detail caused by predictability effects. Information density (ID) is defined as contextual predictability or surprisal (S(unit_i) = -log2 P(unit_i|context)) and estimated from language models based on large text corpora. In addition to surprisal, we include word frequency, and prosodic factors, such as primary lexical stress, prosodic boundary, and articulation rate, as predictors of segmental variability in our statistical analysis. As acoustic-phonetic measures, we investigate segment duration and deletion, voice onset time (VOT), vowel dispersion, global spectral characteristics of vowels, dynamic formant measures and voice quality metrics. Vowel dispersion is analyzed in the context of German learners' speech and in a cross-linguistic study. As results, we replicate previous findings of reduced segment duration (and VOT), higher likelihood to delete, and less vowel dispersion for easily predictable segments. Easily predictable German vowels have less formant change in their vowel section length (VSL), F1 slope and velocity, are less curved in their F2, and show increased breathiness values in cepstral peak prominence (smoothed) than vowels that are difficult to predict from their context. Results for word frequency show similar tendencies: German segments in high-frequency words are shorter, more likely to delete, less dispersed, and show less magnitude in formant change, less F2 curvature, as well as less harmonic richness in open quotient smoothed than German segments in low-frequency words. These effects are found even though we control for the expected and much more effective effects of stress, boundary, and speech rate. In the cross-linguistic analysis of vowel dispersion, the effect of ID is robust across almost all of the six languages and the three intended speech rates. Surprisal does not affect vowel dispersion of non-native German speakers. Surprisal and prosodic factors interact in explaining segmental variability. Especially, stress and surprisal complement each other in their positive effect on segment duration, vowel dispersion and magnitude in formant change. Regarding perception we observe that listeners are sensitive to differences in phonetic detail stemming from high and low surprisal contexts for the same lexical target.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {phdthesis}
}

There is growing evidence that information-theoretic principles influence linguistic structures. Regarding speech several studies have found that phonetic structures lengthen in duration and strengthen in their spectral features when they are difficult to predict from their context, whereas easily predictable phonetic structures are shortened and reduced spectrally. Most of this evidence comes from studies on American English, only some studies have shown similar tendencies in Dutch, Finnish, or Russian. In this context, the Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis (Aylett and Turk 2004, Aylett and Turk 2006) emerged claiming that the effect of information-theoretic factors on the segmental structure is moderated through the prosodic structure. In this thesis, we investigate the impact and interaction of information density and prosodic structure on segmental variability in production analyses, mainly based on German read speech, and also listeners' perception of differences in phonetic detail caused by predictability effects. Information density (ID) is defined as contextual predictability or surprisal (S(unit_i) = -log2 P(unit_i|context)) and estimated from language models based on large text corpora. In addition to surprisal, we include word frequency, and prosodic factors, such as primary lexical stress, prosodic boundary, and articulation rate, as predictors of segmental variability in our statistical analysis. As acoustic-phonetic measures, we investigate segment duration and deletion, voice onset time (VOT), vowel dispersion, global spectral characteristics of vowels, dynamic formant measures and voice quality metrics. Vowel dispersion is analyzed in the context of German learners' speech and in a cross-linguistic study. As results, we replicate previous findings of reduced segment duration (and VOT), higher likelihood to delete, and less vowel dispersion for easily predictable segments. Easily predictable German vowels have less formant change in their vowel section length (VSL), F1 slope and velocity, are less curved in their F2, and show increased breathiness values in cepstral peak prominence (smoothed) than vowels that are difficult to predict from their context. Results for word frequency show similar tendencies: German segments in high-frequency words are shorter, more likely to delete, less dispersed, and show less magnitude in formant change, less F2 curvature, as well as less harmonic richness in open quotient smoothed than German segments in low-frequency words. These effects are found even though we control for the expected and much more effective effects of stress, boundary, and speech rate. In the cross-linguistic analysis of vowel dispersion, the effect of ID is robust across almost all of the six languages and the three intended speech rates. Surprisal does not affect vowel dispersion of non-native German speakers. Surprisal and prosodic factors interact in explaining segmental variability. Especially, stress and surprisal complement each other in their positive effect on segment duration, vowel dispersion and magnitude in formant change. Regarding perception we observe that listeners are sensitive to differences in phonetic detail stemming from high and low surprisal contexts for the same lexical target.

Gessinger, Iona; Möbius, Bernd; Andreeva, Bistra; Raveh, Eran; Steiner, Ingmar

Phonetic accommodation in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment: Intonation and segments Inproceedings

Proceedings of Interspeech 2019, pp. 301-305, Graz, Austria, 2019.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

2018

Brandt, Erika; Zimmerer, Frank; Andreeva, Bistra; Möbius, Bernd

Impact of prosodic structure and information density on dynamic formant trajectories in German Inproceedings

Speech Prosody 2018, Poznan, 2018.

Links | BibTeX

Zimmerer, Frank; Brandt, Erika; Andreeva, Bistra; Möbius, Bernd

Idiomatic or literal? Production of collocations in German read speech Inproceedings

Speech Prosody 2018, Poznan, 2018.

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Malisz, Zofia; Brand, Erika; Möbius, Bernd; Oh, Yoon Mi; Andreeva, Bistra

Dimensions of segmental variability: interaction of prosody and surprisal in six languages Journal Article

Frontiers in Communication / Language Sciences, 3 (25), pp. 1-18, 2018, (sfb1102, c1, speech rate, information density, surprisal, duration, vowel distinctiveness, spectral emphasis).

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2017

Brandt, Erika; Zimmerer, Frank; Andreeva, Bistra; Möbius, Bernd

Mel-cepstral distortion of German vowels in different information density contexts Inproceedings

Proceedings of Interspeech (Stockholm, Sweden), 2017, (C1, sfb1102).

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Zimmerer, Frank; Andreeva, Bistra; Möbius, Bernd; Malisz, Zofia; Ferragne, Emmanuel; Pellegrino, François; Brandt, Erika

Perzeption von Sprechgeschwindigkeit und der (nicht nachgewiesene) Einfluss von Surprisal Inproceedings

Trouvain, Jürgen; Steiner, Ingmar; Möbius, Bernd (Ed.): Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2017 - Tagungsband der 28. Konferenz, Saarbrücken, 15.-17. März 2017. Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation, Band 86, pp. 174-179, 2017.

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