Multilingual speech annotation of landmarks and other acoustic cues to distinctive features

Abstract

A speech annotation system developed for English that identifies landmarks and other acoustic cues to distinctive features (Stevens, 2002; Huilgol et al., 2019) has been extended to Spanish and Korean. This process includes retrieving the (allo)phone sequence for the words of a target utterance from a standard lexicon, converting this sequence into an underlying phoneme sequence, and then generating citation-form landmark and other acoustic cue sequences from the phoneme sequence and its features. This standard set is presented to labelers who examine the waveform of the target utterance and mark which of the predicted cues have been realized, or deleted, and where unpredicted cues have been inserted. For each language, we draw from a superset of acoustic cues that function in all three languages, but each language also makes use of an additional set of acoustic cues specific to that language.