A spoken Afrikaans language resource designed for research on pronunciation variations (original) (raw)
Related papers
The origin of Afrikaans pronunciation: a comparison to west Germanic languages and Dutch dialects
This paper aims to find the origin of the Afrikaans pronuncia-tion with the use of dialectometry. First, Afrikaans was com-pared to Standard Dutch, Standard Frisian and Standard Ger-man. Pronunciation distances were measured by means of Lev-enshtein distances. Afrikaans was found to be closest to Stan-dard Dutch. Second, the Afrikaans pronunciation was com-pared to 361 Dutch dialect varieties in the Netherlands and North-Belgium. Material from the Reeks Nederlandse Dialec-tatlassen was used. Afrikaans was found to be closest to the South Holland variety of Zoetermeer, which largely agrees with Kloeke (1950, Herkomst en Groei van het Afrikaans).
Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects
Studies in Language Variation, 2009
The so-called Goeman-Taeldeman-Van Reenen Project (GTRP) consists of a large online database of 613 local dialects of Dutch on the basis of which the phonologies and morphologies of these dialects can be systematically compared. In this paper we present a quantitative investigation of an aspect of the reliability of the GTRP data. To this end, we performed a series of statistical analyses in order (1) to detect to which extent the various investigators involved affected the data regarding the palatalisation and velarisation of coronal nasal-plosive clusters, and (2) to determine the weight of the effects exerted on the variability in the data by the investigators, dialect geography, diachronic and synchronic internal factors as well as several parameters of usage. The findings are relevant for both theoretical and methodological reasons. In the former connection, we discuss the effects of the phonological as well as frequency factors determining palatalisation and velarisation in this environment. In the latter connection, we make suggestions for the calibration and enrichment of phonological databases. Academy of Sciences
Speaker accent influences the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Knowledge of accent-based acoustic variations can therefore be used in the development of more robust systems. This paper investigates the differences between first language (L1) and second language (L2) English in South Africa and is specifically aimed at L2 English speakers with a native African mother tongue for instance Xhosa, Zulu or South Sotho. The vowel systems of English, and African languages, as described in the linguistic literature, were compared to predict the expected deviations of L2 South African English from the L1 norm. A total of fifty context dependent phonemes from L1 and L2 speakers were acoustically compared and analysed in both formant and mel-scaled cepstral domains. The measured variations compared favourably to those linguistically predicted. The long term goal of this project is to aid in the adaptation of existing L1 English recognition systems for South African L2 English.
An aggregate analysis of pronunciation in the Goeman-Taeldeman-Van Reenen-Project data
2007
Abstract Contemporary Dutch dialects are compared using the Levenshtein distance, a measure of pronunciation difference. The material consists of data from the most recent Dutch dialect source available: the Goeman-Taeldeman-Van Reenen-Project (GTRP). This data consists of transcriptions of 1876 items for 613 localities in the Netherlands and Belgium gathered during the period 1980–1995.
2005
Speaker accent influences the accuracy of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Knowledge of accent-based acoustic variations can therefore be used in the development of more robust systems. This paper investigates the differences between first language (L1) and second language (L2) English in South Africa and is specifically aimed at L2 English speakers with a native African mother tongue for instance Xhosa, Zulu or South Sotho. The vowel systems of English, and African languages, as described in the linguistic literature, were compared to predict the expected deviations of L2 South African English from the L1 norm. A total of fifty context dependent phonemes from L1 and L2 speakers were acoustically compared and analysed in both formant and mel-scaled cepstral domains. The measured variations compared favourably to those linguistically predicted. The long term goal of this project is to aid in the adaptation of existing L1 English recognition systems for South African L2 English.
Acoustic analysis of diphthongs in Standard South African English
Diphthongs typically form an integral part of the phone sets used in English ASR systems. Because diphthongs can be represented using smaller units (that are already part of the vowel system) this representation may be inefficient. We evaluate the need for diphthongs in a Standard South African English (SSAE) ASR system by replacing them with selected variants and analysing the system results. We define a systematic process to identify and evaluate replacement options for diphthongs and find that removing all diphthongs completely does not have a significant detrimental effect on the performance of the ASR system, even though the size of the phone set is reduced significantly. These results provide linguistic insights into the pronunciation of diphthongs in SSAE and simplifies further analysis of the acoustic properties of an SSAE ASR system.
An acoustic description of the vowels of Northern and Southern Standard Dutch
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2004
A database is presented of measurements of the fundamental frequency, the frequencies of the first three formants, and the duration of the 15 vowels of Standard Dutch as spoken in the Netherlands ͑Northern Standard Dutch͒ and in Belgium ͑Southern Standard Dutch͒. The speech material consisted of read monosyllabic utterances in a neutral consonantal context ͑i.e., /sVs/͒. Recordings were made for 20 female talkers and 20 male talkers, who were stratified for the factors age, gender, and region. Of the 40 talkers, 20 spoke Northern Standard Dutch and 20 spoke Southern Standard Dutch. The results indicated that the nine monophthongal Dutch vowels /a Ä } i ( Å u y +/ can be separated fairly well given their steady-state characteristics, while the long mid vowels /e o Ö/ and three diphthongal vowels /}( Åu !y/ also require information about their dynamic characteristics. The analysis of the formant values indicated that Northern Standard Dutch and Southern Standard Dutch differ little in the formant frequencies at steady-state for the nine monophthongal vowels. Larger differences between these two language varieties were found for the dynamic specifications of the three long mid vowels, and, to a lesser extent, of the three diphthongal vowels.
Preparing a corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues for automatic phonetic analysis
This paper presents the steps needed to make a corpus of Dutch spontaneous dialogues accessible for automatic phonetic research aimed at increasing our understanding of reduction phenomena and the role of fine phonetic detail. Since the corpus was not created with automatic processing in mind, it needed to be reshaped. The first part of this paper describes the actions needed for this reshaping in some detail. The second part reports the results of a preliminary analysis of the reduction phenomena in the corpus. For this purpose a phonemic transcription of the corpus was created by means of a forced alignment, first with a lexicon of canonical pronunciations and then with multiple pronunciation variants per word. In this study pronunciation variants were generated by applying a large set of phonetic processes that have been implicated in reduction to the canonical pronunciations of the words. This relatively straightforward procedure allows us to produce plausible pronunciation variants and to verify and extend the results of previous reduction studies reported in the literature.