Information-Theoretic Approaches in Speech Processing

Content

This project seminar is concerned with the relation between information density and phonetic encoding. We will discuss research papers that address the question of how the phonetic encoding is modulated by systematic changes in the phonetic structure. Participants will formulate research questions and carry out experiments to investigate how phonetic features pattern as a function of the predictability and the surprisal level of the linguistic expression. Effects of information density are expected to influence speakers' choices in production and listeners' preferences in perception.

During the compact course week, the morning sessions are dedicated to the discussion of research papers and to tutorials in the afternoon. The tutorials will prepare the participants for their project work, which will be completed and presented before the Christmas break.

Requirements

All participants should have attended the lecture "Information Theory" or have equivalent background on the topic. Contact Bernd Möbius if in doubt.

Every participant will prepare a 30 min presentation on a paper. Two students will present per morning session, and should prepare their presentation together. This means that we will have two presentations per session, but these presentations should be on a common topic, and explicitly relate to one another. The task is not only to present the paper, but also to prepare a discussion of how the two papers relate to one another, and what this tells us about information-theoretic accounts of speech processing.

Readings

• Aylett, M. and Turk, A. (2004): The smooth signal redundancy hypothesis: a functional explanation for relationships between redundancy, prosodic prominence, and duration in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech 47, 31-56. - pdf
• Aylett, M. and Turk, A. (2006): Language redundancy predicts syllabic duration and the spectral characteristics of vocalic syllable nuclei. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119(1), 30-48. - pdf
• Dellwo, V., Ferragne, E. and Pellegrino, F. (2006): The perception of intended speech rate in English, French, and German by French speakers. Proc. Speech Prosody 2006 (Dresden). - pdf
• Pellegrino, F., Coupe, C. and Marsico, E. (2011): Across-language perspective on speech information rate. Language 87.3, 539-558. - pdf
• Bell, A., Brenier, J., Gregory, M., Girand, C. and Jurafsky, D. (2009): Predictability effects on durations of content and function words in conversational English. Journal of Memory and Language 60(1), 92-111. - pdf
• Jurafsky, D., Bell, A., Gregory, M. and Raymond, W.D. (2001): Probabilistic relations between words: Evidence from reduction in lexical production. In J. Bybee and P. Hopper (eds.), Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Benjamins, Amsterdam. 229-254. - pdf
• Durrant, P. and Doherty, A. (2010): Are high-frequency collocations psychologically real? Investigating the thesis of collocational priming. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6(2), 125-155. - pdf
• Michelbacher, L., Evert, S. and Schütze, H. (2011): Asymmetry in corpus-derived and human word associations. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 7(2), 245-276. - pdf
• Altman, G. and Carter, D. (1989): Lexical stress and lexical discriminability: Stressed syllables are more informative, but why? Computer Speech and Language 3, 265-275. - pdf
• van Bergem, D.R. (1993): Acoustic vowel reduction as a function of sentence accent, word stress, and word class. Speech Communication 12, 1-23. - pdf