| 1. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Auditory vs. audiovisual prominence ratings of speech involving spontaneously produced head movements
- 2022
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Speech Prosody : Speech Prosody 2022 - Speech Prosody 2022. - : International Speech Communication Association. - 2333-2042. ; , s. 352-356, s. 352-356
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Visual information can be integrated in prominence perception, but most available evidence stems from controlled experimental settings, often involving synthetic stimuli. The present study provides evidence from spontaneously produced head gestures that occurred in Swedish television news readings. Sixteen short clips (containing 218 words in total) were rated for word prominence by 85 adult volunteers in a between-subjects design (44 in an audio-visual vs. 41 in an audio-only condition) using a web-based rating task. As an initial test of overall rating behavior, average prominence across all 218 words was compared between the two conditions, revealing no significant difference. In a second step, we compared normalized prominence ratings between the two conditions for all 218 words individually. These results displayed significant (or near significant, p
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| 2. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, et al.
(författare)
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F0 Peak Timing, Height, and Shape as Independent Features
- 2014
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Ingår i: Proc. of The 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. - Nijmegen : The International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). ; , s. 138-142, s. 138-142
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- A considerable amount of evidence from several intonation languages (e.g., German, English, Italian) supports the idea that F0 peak timing, height, and shape variables form a feature bundle, which is used to encode two-fold intonational (e.g., sentence-level) pitch accent distinctions such as L+H* vs. L*+H. The three types of features in the bundle can be weighted differently but the outcome seems to be functionally equivalent. In this sense, they are ‘substitute phonetic features’. This paper presents data from two distinct prosodic dialect types of Swedish, a pitch-accent language, suggesting that these F0 variables can also be used independently of each other in order to encode two different contrasts (i.e., a three-fold contrast), each of which phonetically and functionally related to the L+H* vs. L*+H distinction in an intonation language. For Central Swedish, we observe two peak raising strategies which go along with differently shaped rises: ‘extending’ (= faster rise) and ‘shifting’ (= slower rise), which tend to be used to signal ‘speaker-related’ emphasis (e.g., ‘surprise’) or ‘messagerelated’ emphasis (e.g., ‘correction’), respectively. For Southern Swedish, we observe an ‘extended’ peak and an ‘extended and delayed’ peak.
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| 3. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Multimodal prominence ratings : Effects of screen size and audio device
- 2019
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Ingår i: Book of Abstracts MMSYM 2019. - : University of Leuven. ; , s. 2-3
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Prosodic prominence is a multimodal phenomenon involving both acoustic and kinematic dimensions. In order to study the multimodal nature of prominence, we need to collect prominence ratings based on audio-visual speech material from large groups of speakers. This is feasible by means of a web-based crowdsourcing set-up, allowing volunteers to participate using a private computer or mobile phone. However, this freedom also implies a certain reduction of experimental control due to variation in hardware used by the raters. In this pilot study we explore potential effects of two hardware features – screen size and audio device (headphones vs. loudspeakers) – on multimodal prominence ratings. To this end, 16 brief clips from Swedish television news (218 words in total) were rated by 31 native Swedish volunteers using a web-based set-up. In our GUI, orthographic representations of the text were displayed below the video player. Each word was to be rated as either non-prominent, moderately prominent, or strongly prominent, by means of clicking on the word in question until the desired prominence level was encoded through a specific color (yellow: moderate; red: strong). Participants were free to use a mobile phone, a tablet, or a computer, and headphones or loudspeakers, and we collected information about their hardware using a questionnaire. In addition, we automatically logged the screen size of the participant’s computer/phone. We applied two different approaches to analyze the participant’s rating behavior as a function of the hardware features under discussion. First, we calculated a selection of five variables from the raw prominence ratings: (i) the sum of all ratings (over all 218 words), (ii) the percentage of words rated as (moderately or strongly) prominent, (iii) among prominent words, the proportion of words rated as strongly prominent, and (iv-v) the relative prominence rating of two selected words. Effects of screen size and audio device on these variables were analyzed using linear regression models. Second, we calculated inter-rater reliability for multiple raters using Fleiss’ kappa, both for all raters as a reference and for subgroups concerning audio device and screen size. The results reveal a significant model fit for variable (iii) defined above (proportion of strong ratings; F(5;21) = 5.332; p=.0022**), suggesting a significantly higher proportion of strong prominent ratings obtained with loudspeakers (34.0% of words rated as prominent on average) compared to with headphones (18.3%; t=2.944; p=.0073**), as well as with medium size screens (34.2%) compared to with small screens (24.4%; t=2.433; p=.0232*); however, the proportion of strong prominent ratings tended to be lowest with large screens (14.2% on average). Effects of screen size were also reflected in inter-rater reliability, revealing the highest kappa for users with medium-sized screens (kappa=.566, when ratings are recoded to a binary decision) compared to large (kappa=.485) and small screens (mobile phones, kappa=.437). However, inter-rater reliability was less affected by the listening condition (headphones vs. loudspeakers). 3 To conclude, the choice of hardware might have effects on multimodal prominence ratings, which has to be considered in crowdsourcing approaches. More detailed results will be presented at the conference.
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| 4. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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On the Intonation of Confirmations in Southern Swedish
- 2013
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Ingår i: Nordic Prosody. - : Peter Lang Publishing Group. - 9783653030471 ; , s. 87-96
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper studies how confirmations are intoned by nine speakers of Southern Swedish. Test phrases like ja, det var med bilen/bilar ‘yes, it was by car’ (Accent 1)/‘...with cars’ (Accent 2) were elicited, both as new-information responses and confirmations. Speakers made a clear distinction between the utterance types using two, simultaneous intonation strategies. First, they realised the nuclear accent on the target word with a considerably lower F0 peak in con- firmations than in new-information responses. Second, they added a pre-nuclear accent on the verb in confirmations. While they maintained the word-accent distinction on the target word in confirmations, the encoding of the word accent (Accent 1) on the verb seemed to be op- tional. This suggests that the pre-nuclear accent serves a primarily intonational function and that Southern Swedish may have purely intonational pitch accents, contrary to the traditional view.
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| 5. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Perceiving head movements in news readings : Evidence from web-based auditory vs. audiovisual prominence ratings
- 2021
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Ingår i: Working Papers 56. 2021. - Lund : Lund University. ; , s. 36-41
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Previous research has shown that visual information can be integrated in the perception of prominence, but the available evidence stems mostly from controlled experimental settings, often making use of synthetic stimuli. The present study provides evidence from spontaneously produced head gestures that occurred in Swedish television news readings. Materials were rated for word prominence by 85 adult volunteers in a between-subjects design (audio-visual vs. audio-only ratings) using a crowd-sourcing approach. Accented words accompanied by a head movement were perceived as more prominent than accented words lacking a head movement. Crucially, the difference in perceived prominence level between words with and without a head gesture was found to be larger in an audio-visual rating condition compared to an audio-only condition. The results suggest that visual prominence signals are integrated in speech processing even in a relatively uncontrolled, naturalistic setting, such as watching the news.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, et al.
(författare)
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The prosody of contrastive topics in Southern Swedish
- 2012
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Ingår i: Proceedings FONETIK 2012 : The XXVth Swedish Phonetics Conference, May 30–June 1, 2012. - Gothenburg : Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg. - 9789163709852 ; , s. 1-4
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper presents a pilot study on the prosodic marking of a contrastive topic in Southern Swedish. A test sentence was elicited in three experimental conditions: initial focus; final focus; contrastive topic (initial word) plus focus (final word). F0 patterns were analysed in recordings of 10 speakers. A majority of the speakers distinguished clearly between the conditions, but speakers employed different strategies. The most common one involved modifying the range and/or level of the F0 patterns given by the lexical pitch accents. Another frequent strategy involved a rising pitch accent on the initial word, where the lexical pitch accent would normally stipulate a fall. This result was unexpected and indicates that Southern Swedish sentence intonation might be more complex than typically assumed.
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| 8. |
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Ambrazaitis, Gilbert, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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Word prominence ratings in Swedish television news readings : Effects of pitch accents and head movements
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody. - : International Speech Communication Association. - 2333-2042. ; , s. 314-318, s. 314-318
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Prosodic prominence is a multimodal phenomenon where pitch accents are frequently aligned with visible movements by the hands, head, or eyebrows. However, little is known about how such movements function as visible prominence cues in multimodal speech perception with most previous studies being restricted to experimental settings. In this study, we are piloting the acquisition of multimodal prominence ratings for a corpus of natural speech (Swedish television news readings). Sixteen short video clips (218 words) of news readings were extracted from a larger corpus and rated by 44 native Swedish adult volunteers using a web-based set-up. The task was to rate each word in a clip as either non-prominent, moderately prominent or strongly prominent based on audiovisual cues. The corpus was previously annotated for pitch accents and head movements. We found that words realized with a pitch accent and head movement tended to receive higher prominence ratings than words with a pitch accent only. However, we also examined ratings for a number of carefully selected individual words, and these case studies suggest that ratings are affected by complex relations between the presence of a head movement and its type of alignment, the word's F0 profile, and semantic and pragmatic factors.
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