Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora

The Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora introduces methods of analyzing phonetically-labelled speech corpora, with the goal of testing hypotheses that often arise in experimental phonetics and laboratory phonology. The book begins by discussing some of the techniques in digital speech processing and in structuring and querying annotations from speech corpora. The second half of the book focuses on analysis, including measuring gestural synchronization using electromagnetic articulometry (EMA), the acoustics of vowels, consonant overlap using electropalatography (EPG), spectral analysis of fricatives and obstruents, and the probabilistic classification of acoustic speech data.

Each chapter has an extensive set of exercises, with answers to reinforce the techniques introduced. An overview of the necessary software tools, including the R programming language, enables the reader to duplicate the stages of analysis computationally. Clearly laid out, with easy-to-follow computer commands, spectrograms of speech corpora, and a companion website with more illustrations and downloadable speech corpora for testing purposes, this book is a complete resource for the research increasingly conducted in phonetics.