Study title

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.This project dealt with the phonetic details of intonation in Dutch and English. It focused on the alignment of intonational targets (e.g. local peaks and valleys) with the vowels and consonants in speech. Limited past research had suggested that this is systematic, but the factors that affect it are not well understood. The depositor's earlier research suggested that in many cases intonation targets are anchored to specific sounds (e.g. the beginning of the vowel following a stressed syllable). This kind of precision was rather unexpected, because investigators have concentrated on more variable effects (e.g. the closer a target is to the end of a word, the earlier it is aligned). The main goal of this project was to determine how general this anchoring is, what kind of landmarks (consonants, vowels, word ends, etc.) can serve as anchors, and how much the alignment of anchored targets can be affected by more variable factors. One practical motivation for this research was to provide the basic knowledge for improvements to synthetic speech. Most of the empirical research of the proposed project consisted of experiments in both English and Dutch, in which carefully selected sentences were read aloud and detailed acoustical measurements made of the speech. The depositor also studied short (5-10 minute) dialogues spoken under somewhat controlled conditions these are the Map Task dialogues deposited in this dataset. English and Dutch were chosen because their sound structures are similar enough that conclusions can be generalised from one language to the other, yet different enough that certain kinds of experimental controls can be used in one language which would be impossible in the other. Also, both languages support important speech technology industries.Main Topics:This corpus of natural Dutch conversation was collected as part of a project primarily concerned with the phonology and...