Measuring and Comparing Vowel Qualities in a Dutch Spontaneous SpeechCorpus (original) (raw)
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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.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2007
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.
Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII, 2011
Recent vowel corpora show that there are often clear acoustic differences between vowels produced in different phonetic contexts. We expand on a recent corpus of Northern Standard Dutch (NSD) vowels by including a variety of consonantal contexts. Our results show that there are very clear contextual effects on the spectral and temporal properties of NSD vowels. The most striking effect is the apparent 'fronting' of vowels in alveolar contexts, which has not previously been reported for Dutch. Classification with a supervised learning algorithm reveals some substantial differences between our acoustic measurements and those reported in earlier studies on NSD vowels.
Language Variation and Change, 2014
It is common practice in sociophonetics to measure vowel formants at one (monophthongs) or two (diphthongs) time points. This paper compares this traditional target approach with two dynamic approaches for investigating regional patterns of variation: the multiple time point approach, which measures formants at successive time points, and the regression approach, which estimates formant dynamics over time by fitting polynomial regression equations to formant contours. The speech material consisted of monosyllabic words containing all full vowels of Dutch, except for /y/. These words were read out by 160 speakers of Standard Dutch, who were distributed over four regions in the Netherlands and four regions in Flanders, Belgium. The results show that dynamic approaches outperform the target approach in uncovering regional vowel differences, which suggests that sociophonetic vowel studies that apply the target approach run the risk of overlooking important sociolinguistic patterns.
DUTCH DIPHTHONG AND LONG VOWEL REALIZATIONS AS CHANGING SOCIOECONOMIC MARKERS
2007
To judge the influence of speaker background on the quality of five long vowels and diphthongs /oU/, /eI/, /Au/, /EI/, and /2y/ in Standard Dutch, the spectra of these vowel realizations in spontaneous speech were measured for 70 subjects, and analyzed with regard to the subjects' regions of education and residence, their level of education and occupation, as well as their sex and age. Our preliminary analyses indic- ated that high educated speakers lowered (higher F1, articulated more open) the long vowels and diph- thongs and diphthongized them stronger than low educated speakers. There seemed to be effects of age but more data were needed to specify these. The new data show that besides the level of educa- tion or occupation, the factor 'age group' has a ma- jor effect on the variations in speech production. The vowel attributes 'onset' and 'degree of diphthong- ization' were affected variably by speaker back- ground data. Speakers of the older ...
Vowel reduction in spontaneous spoken Dutch
2003
This paper reports on a study of vowel reduction in contemporary Standard Dutch. The focus is on the first, unstressed syllable of four bisyllabic Dutch words: moment, manier, probeer(t) and docent. Vowel reduction is studied in a corpus of spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch, produced by 80 Flemish and 80 Dutch teachers of Dutch. Three labelers independently evaluated and scored the stimuli on a seven point scale with 'long vowel' and 'complete deletion' as its extreme values. Three main types of vowel reduction were distinguished: reduction to schwa (e.g. moment > m> @ment), vowel shortening (e.g. m>o@ment > m> @ment) and complete reduction (e.g. moment > 'ment). Short vowels appeared to be most frequent, especially in Flanders. Reduction to schwa and complete reduction only occurred in the Netherlands. The Dutch material also supports the assumption that in highfrequency words vowels are more easily reduced than in words with a lower frequency.
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Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2015
Theories and methods modelling vowel quality in terms of vowel inherent spectral change (VISC) have been developed and tested overwhelmingly on North American English (AE) dialects, which raises the question of their generalisability in non-AE dialects and other languages. The present paper examines VISC as an aspect of vowel quality in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and Northern Standard Dutch (NSD). Despite markedly different VISC patterns, SSBE vowels are analysable along the same lines as in AE. While the same mostly holds for NSD, VISC is found to be more important for determining SSBE vowel quality, especially for SSBE nominal diphthongs. Additionally, a pair of NSD diphthongs presents a challenge for current theories and methods as they are acoustically similar. In line with studies on AE, theorising vowel quality in terms of VISC aids descriptions of vowels and removes the need to treat nominal monophthongs and diphthongs in different ways.
The relative divergence of Dutch dialect pronunciations from their common source
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In this paper we use the Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen as a source for the reconstruction of a 'proto-language' of Dutch dialects. We used 360 dialects from locations in the Netherlands, the northern part of Belgium and French-Flanders. The density of dialect locations is about the same everywhere. For each dialect we reconstructed 85 words. For the reconstruction of vowels we used knowledge of Dutch history, and for the reconstruction of consonants we used well-known tendencies found in most textbooks about historical linguistics. We validated results by comparing the reconstructed forms with pronunciations according to a proto-Germanic dictionary . For 46% of the words we reconstructed the same vowel or the closest possible vowel when the vowel to be reconstructed was not found in the dialect material. For 52% of the words all consonants we reconstructed were the same. For 42% of the words, only one consonant was differently reconstructed. We measured the divergence of Dutch dialects from their 'proto-language'. We measured pronunciation distances to the protolanguage we reconstructed ourselves and correlated them with pronunciation distances we measured to proto-Germanic based on the dictionary. Pronunciation distances were measured using Levenshtein distance, a string edit distance measure. We found a relatively strong correlation (r=0.87).
Sources of phonological variation in a large database for Dutch dialects
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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