Polish Rhythmic Database ― New Resources for Speech Timing and Rhythm Analysis

Polish rhythmic database – new resources for speech timing and rhythm analysis Agnieszka Wagner, Katarzyna Klessa, Jolanta Bachan Institute of Linguistics, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Poznań, Poland wagner@amu.edu.pl, katarzyna@klessa.pl, jolabachan@gmail.com Abstract This paper reports on a new database – Polish rhythmic database and tools developed with the aim of investigating timing phenomena and rhythmic structure in Polish including topics such as, inter alia, the effect of speaking style and tempo on timing patterns, phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm and stability of rhythm metrics. So far, 19 native and 12 non-native speakers with different first languages have been recorded. The collected speech data (5 h 14 min.) represents five different speaking styles and five different tempi. For the needs of speech corpus management, annotation and analysis, a database was developed and integrated with Annotation Pro (Klessa et al., 2013, Klessa, 2016). Currently, the database is the only resource for Polish which allows for a systematic study of a broad range of phenomena related to speech timing and rhythm. The paper also introduces new tools and methods developed to facilitate the database annotation and analysis with respect to various timing and rhythm measures. In the end, the results of an ongoing research and first experimental results using the new resources are reported and future work is sketched. Keywords: speech rhythm, timing, Polish 1. Background and motivation The current knowledge on timing patterns and speech rhythm in Polish is incomplete. Many issues have not been investigated yet, e.g. phonotactic properties of rhythm at the phrase level, cross-linguistic perception and production of rhythmic structure and grouping in Polish as first (L1) and second/foreign language (L2), or have been studied only within a limited scope, e.g. the effect of tempo on speech timing (Malisz, 2011), acoustic and perceptual correlates of prosodic prominence and phrasing (Demenko, 1999; Wagner, 2008; Malisz & Wagner, 2012) or rhythmic classification of Polish (Ramus et al., 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Mairano & Romano, 2011). The limitations of the current state of knowledge can be attributed to limitations of the available language resources. In recent years, large databases of spoken Polish have been collected such as Jurisdict (Demenko et al., 2008), Diagest (Jarmołowicz et al., 2007) or Paralingua (Klessa et al., 2013). However, these corpora were designed either for a specific application (dictated speech for a speech recognizer – Jurisdict) or task (emotion portrayals – Paralingua), or as quasi-spontaneous conversations under variable recording conditions and mutual interlocutor visibility (Diagest and Paralingua). Such recording scenarios allow for studying only those aspects of speech rhythm that are available for the respective speaking styles. In order to enable systematic analyses of timing- and rhythm-related phenomena in Polish, we have developed a new corpus consisting of data characterized by a highly controlled structure with respect to rhythmic organization of utterances: Polish rhythmic database. Additionally, we propose new tools and methods to facilitate the database annotation and analysis with respect to various timing and rhythm measures. 2. Data collection 2.1 Design criteria With …

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