Extending automatic vowel formant extraction to New Englishes
A comparison of different methods
Thorsten Brato | University of Regensburg
José Alejandro Matute Flores | University of Münster
While different automated procedures for vowel formant prediction have recently been proposed, it is unclear how reliably
these methods perform in the phonetic study of vowels in New Englishes and how such approaches could be applied to specific varieties. This
paper compares different automatic methods for vowel formant prediction in New Englishes, using manual measurements of Trinidadian English
as a baseline. The results show that all methods perform significantly better than default formant parameters often used in speech analysis
packages, and that a Bayesian formant tracker calibrated with American (US-FAVE) and Trinidadian English (TRINI-FAVE) generally provides
better results than an automatic procedure that optimizes formant ceilings on a vowel- and speaker-specific level. TRINI-FAVE measures
vowels characteristic of Trinidadian English most accurately. Phonetic studies of vowels in New Englishes can benefit from these
methods.
Keywords: automatic formant prediction, FAVE, Trinidadian English, vowels, New Englishes, formant ceiling optimization, automated acoustic analysis
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Trinidadian English
- 3.Data and methods
- 3.1Data
- 3.2TRINI-FAVE
- 3.3Formant ceiling optimization
- 3.4Analysis
- 4.Results
- 4.1Overall comparison to the manual baseline
- 4.2Automatic prediction of monophthongs and diphthongs
- 4.3Differences in predicting individual vowel classes
- 4.4Visual inspection of formant plots
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion and recommendations
- Notes
-
References
Published online: 27 January 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00060.mee
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00060.mee
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