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Phonology Circle - Leslie Li / Representing speech rhythm

PhD student Leslie Ruolan Li, in three-quarter profile, standing in front of TV screen projecting the title of her presentation, "How much rhythm is in short-time acoustics?"

Phonology Circle - Leslie Li / Representing speech rhythm

Linguistics Wednesday, November 2, 2022 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm Marie Mount Hall,

Wednesday November 2, Leslie Li leads the Phonology Circle, with discussion of initial and recent results on temporal modulation in different languages, with some discussion on how this may be related to crosslinguistic differences in speech rhythm.

Abstract

Speech rhythm is salient to newborns and adults alike, but as a suprasegmental feature, defining and capturing speech rhythm is difficult. Recent work has found universals in the slow amplitude modulation in speech across different languages (Ding et al., 2017), with a peak around 4--5 Hz that is said to be about the syllable rate. Meanwhile, Varnet et al. (2017) have found cross-linguistic differences in speech rhythm depending on the location and height of the said peak. In the first part of my presentation tomorrow, I will discuss some conceptual replication of these results, along with some tweaks and sanity checks to see what is happening behind the amplitude modulation spectrum. In the second part of the presentation, I will combine this method with Harmonic-Percussive source separation, a technique borrowed from music information retrieval and was used in a recent model to simulate newborns' perception of rhythm (Li et al., 2022). 

Add to Calendar 11/02/22 15:00:00 11/02/22 16:00:00 America/New_York Phonology Circle - Leslie Li / Representing speech rhythm

Wednesday November 2, Leslie Li leads the Phonology Circle, with discussion of initial and recent results on temporal modulation in different languages, with some discussion on how this may be related to crosslinguistic differences in speech rhythm.

Abstract

Speech rhythm is salient to newborns and adults alike, but as a suprasegmental feature, defining and capturing speech rhythm is difficult. Recent work has found universals in the slow amplitude modulation in speech across different languages (Ding et al., 2017), with a peak around 4--5 Hz that is said to be about the syllable rate. Meanwhile, Varnet et al. (2017) have found cross-linguistic differences in speech rhythm depending on the location and height of the said peak. In the first part of my presentation tomorrow, I will discuss some conceptual replication of these results, along with some tweaks and sanity checks to see what is happening behind the amplitude modulation spectrum. In the second part of the presentation, I will combine this method with Harmonic-Percussive source separation, a technique borrowed from music information retrieval and was used in a recent model to simulate newborns' perception of rhythm (Li et al., 2022). 

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