Related papers: The Trajectory of Voice Onset Time with Vocal Agin…
Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
The performance of speaker verification systems is adversely affected by speaker aging. However, due to challenges in data collection, particularly the lack of sustained and large-scale longitudinal data for individuals, research on speaker…
Because of permanent use-dependent brain plasticity, all lifelong individuals' experiences are believed to influence the cognitive aging quality. In older individuals, both former and current musical practices have been associated with…
The study uses the British National Corpus 2014, a large sample of contemporary spoken British English, to investigate language patterns across different age groups. Our research attempts to explore how language patterns vary between…
Advancements in AI-driven speech-based applications have transformed diverse industries ranging from healthcare to customer service. However, the increasing prevalence of non-native accented speech in global interactions poses significant…
Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions. How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization. While…
This article develops a general detection theory for speech analysis based on time-varying autoregressive models, which themselves generalize the classical linear predictive speech analysis framework. This theory leads to a computationally…
Voice Onset Time (VOT), a key measurement of speech for basic research and applied medical studies, is the time between the onset of a stop burst and the onset of voicing. When the voicing onset precedes burst onset the VOT is negative; if…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
The speech signal is a consummate example of time-series data. The acoustics of the signal change over time, sometimes dramatically. Yet, the most common type of comparison we perform in phonetics is between instantaneous acoustic…
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic increase in the use of face masks worldwide. Face coverings can affect both acoustic properties of the signal as well as speech patterns and have unintended effects if the person wearing the mask…
The use of abusive language online has become an increasingly pervasive problem that damages both individuals and society, with effects ranging from psychological harm right through to escalation to real-life violence and even death.…
The temporal dynamics of speech, encompassing variations in rhythm, intonation, and speaking rate, contain important and unique information about speaker identity. This paper proposes a new method for representing speaker characteristics by…
During the first years of life, infant vocalizations change considerably, as infants develop the vocalization skills that enable them to produce speech sounds. Characterizations based on specific acoustic features, protophone categories, or…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Short-term phonetic accommodation is a fundamental driver behind accent change, but how does real-time input from another speaker's voice shape the speech planning representations of an interlocutor? We advance a computational model of…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
Acoustics-to-word models are end-to-end speech recognizers that use words as targets without relying on pronunciation dictionaries or graphemes. These models are notoriously difficult to train due to the lack of linguistic knowledge. It is…
Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…