Article 'The influence of speech rate on Fujisaki model parameters" (3rd)

Clarisa Livia
16611022

The current paper examined found that only at the extreme ends of the tempo range the prosodic structure disintegrates. Otherwise, the configuration in terms of phrase and accent command numbers and positions remains relatively unchanged, and speech rate has mostly an influence on the amplitudes and exact timings of commands.

In general, we found the following trends: This tendency might well be due to the character of the underlying reading material which contains mostly short phrases. The deep boundaries are produced similarly at all tempos, and low speed does not give rise to new phrase commands at shallow boundaries which are rather marked by short pauses.

We also found that speakers tend to produce fewer accent commands at higher speech rates. These observations are similar regardless of whether we anchor the accent command to the syllable onset or the nuclear vowel onset. It is possible that the reading task underlying our data might have affected the outcome of our analyses, as people repeated the same sentences over and over again. Future work will examine other speech materials produced with more natural tempo variations.