Browsing by Person "Bissiri, Maria Paola"

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Analysis and Synthesis of Glottalization Phenomena in German-Accented English
(Springer Verlag, 2014) Kraljevski, I.; Bissiri, Maria Paola; Strecha, G.; Hoffmann, R_diger; Potapova, R.; Ronzhin, A.; Vlado, D.
The present paper investigates the analysis and synthesis of glottalization phenomena in German-accented English. Word-initial glottalization was manually annotated in a subset of a German-accented English speech corpus. For each glottalized segment, time-normalized F0 and log-energy contours were produced and principal component analysis was performed on the contour sets in order to reduce their dimensionality. Centroid contours of the PC clusters were used for contour reconstruction in the resynthesis experiments. The prototype intonation and intensity contours were superimposed over non-glottalized word-initial vowels in order to resynthesize creaky voice. This procedure allows the automatic creation of speech stimuli which could be used in perceptual experiments for basic research on glottalizations.
Comparison of forced-alignment speech recognition and humans for generating reference VAD
(International Speech and Communication Association, 2015) Kraljevski, I.; Tan, Z-H; Bissiri, Maria Paola
This present paper aims to answer the question whether forced-alignment speech recognition can be used as an alternative to humans in generating reference Voice Activity Detection (VAD) transcriptions. An investigation of the level of agreement between automatic/manual VAD transcriptions and the reference ones produced by a human expert was carried out. Thereafter, statistical analysis was employed on the automatically produced and the collected manual transcriptions. Experimental results confirmed that forced-alignment speech recognition can provide accurate and consistent VAD labels.
Perception of Glottalization in Varying Pitch Contexts in Mandarin Chinese
(International Speech Communications Association, 2014-05-20) Bissiri, Maria Paola; Zellers, M.; Ding, H.
Although glottalization has often been associated with low pitch, evidence from a number of sources supports the assertion that this association is not obligatory, and is likely to be language-specific. Following a previous study testing perception of glottalization by German, English, and Swedish listeners, the current research investigates the influence of pitch context on the perception of glottalization by native speakers of a tone language, Mandarin Chinese. Listeners heard AXB sets in which they were asked to match glottalized stimuli with pitch contours. We find that Mandarin listeners tend not to be influenced by the pitch context when judging the pitch of glottalized stretches of speech. These data lend support to the idea that the perception of glottalization varies in relation to language-specific prosodic structure.
Perception of pitch in glottalizations of varying duration by German listeners
(University of Glasgow: Glasgow, 2015-08) Bissiri, Maria Paola; Zellers, M.
Previous studies have shown that glottalization is not necessarily perceived as lower pitch but that pitch perception in glottalization can be influenced by the different size of prosodic domains relevant in the native language of the listener. Speakers of intonation languages were influenced by the preceding pitch context when judging the pitch of longer creaky voice stretches, while speakers of pitch-accent or tone languages were not. The current study investigates pitch perception by German listeners in glottalized stretches of speech whose duration varied along a 10-step continuum. We found that the duration of the glottalized stretches affected the categorization of the stimuli, and that the German listeners were not influenced by the preceding pitch context, unlike in a previous study on longer stretches of glottalization of constant duration. Possibly shorter stretches of glottalization are interpreted as segmental word-boundary phenomena rather than as intonation.