Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Computational Linguistics & Phonetics Fachrichtung 4.7 Universität des Saarlandes

Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 20 May 2010, 16:15
Conference Room 1.17, Building C7 4

What is a tone gesture and how is it coupled to oral constriction gestures?

Doris Mücke
Institut für Linguistik, Phonetik,
Universität zu Köln

Doris Mücke, Henrik Niemann & Martine Grice:

What is a tone gesture and how is it coupled to oral constriction gestures?

Speech can be decomposed into invariant phonological units, articulatory gestures that are temporally coordinated with one another (Browman & Goldstein 1989). A coupled oscillator planning model of speech timing has been developed that provides a possible way of modelling the coordination of gestures in time (Browman & Goldstein 2000; Nam & Saltzman 2003; Nam, Goldstein, Saltzman, in press). In the model, gestures are associated with planning oscillators (or clocks) that are related to each other in a pattern specified by a coupling graph, assumed to be part of an utterance’s phonological representation. In the present study, we model the control of pitch to achieve a given target as a tonal gesture and investigate the temporal coordination of tonal gestures with oral constriction gestures in three languages: Catalan, Italian and German.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Eva Lasarcyk.