The Role of Acoustic Features in Marking Accent and Delimiting Sentence Boundaries in Spoken Polish

M. Igras and B. Ziółko Faculty of Computer Science, Electronics and Telecommunications, Department of Electronics, AGH University of Science and Technology, al. A. Mickiewicza 30, 30-059 Krakow, Poland

Received: November 28, 2013; Revised version: August 14, 2014; In final form: October 22, 2014

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In this article the authors investigated and presented statistical models of acoustic phenomena observed within realizations of phonemes and the correlations of the acoustic properties with functional features, such as accents and sentence boundaries. The authors used two databases: the first one contained separately produced sentences and the second one - phrases extracted from larger, continuous stretches of natural speech. The authors also statistically analyzed the selected features of Polish phonemes' realizations (the duration, energy and power of the phonemes, the fundamental frequency of voiced phones) in order to detect their relations with the phone location in a sentence. Additionally, the authors built the probabilistic models and suggested the evaluation methods to assess quantitatively the phenomena known from phonetic literature. Finally, the authors have identified the pre-boundary lengthening of the phones and a decrease of energy and pitch as the markers of sentence endings. In the place of accented syllables, we have observed a significant increase of total energy and power, accompanied by a local increase of F0. Finally, we have indicated possible application of the results for speech technology.

DOI: 10.12693/APhysPolA.126.1246 PACS numbers: 43.72.+q, 43.55.Ka, 43.72.Ar, 43.72.Ne