New functions for a multipurpose multimodal tool for phonetic and linguistic analysis of very large speech corpora

AbstractThe increased interest for linguistic analysis of spontaneous (i.e. non-prepared) speech from various points of view (semantic, syntactic, morphologic, phonologic and intonative) lead to the development of ever more sophisticated dedicated tools. Although the software Praat emerged as the de facto standard for the analysis of spoken data, its use for intonation studies is often felt as not optimal, notably for its limited capabilities in fundamental frequency tracking. This paper presents some of the recently implemented features of the software WinPitch, developed with the analysis of spontaneous speech in mind (and notably for the C-ORAL-ROM project 10 years ago). Among many features, WinPitch includes a set of multiple pitch tracking algorithms aimed to obtain reliable pitch curves in adverse recording conditions (echo, filtering, poor signal to noise ratio, etc.). Others functions of WinPitch incorporate an integrated concordancer, an on the fly text-sound aligner, and routines for EEG analysis.