School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    Designing an App for Pregnancy Care for a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community
    Smith, W ; Wadley, G ; Daly, JO ; Webb, M ; Hughson, J ; Hajek, J ; Parker, A ; Woodward-Kron, R ; Story, DA (The Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)
    We report a study to design and evaluate an app to support pregnancy information provided to women through an Australian health service. As part of a larger project to provide prenatal resources for culturally and linguistically diverse groups, this study focused on the design and reception of an app with the local Vietnamese community and health professionals of a particular hospital. Our study had three stages: an initial design workshop with the hospital; prototype design and development; prototype-based interviews with health professionals and focus groups with Vietnamese women. We explore how an app of this sort must be designed for a range of different use scenarios, considering its use by consumers with a multiplicity of differing viewpoints about its nature and purpose in relation to pregnancy care.
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    Крылатые выражения из советских кинофильмов как элементы национальной идентичности
    Kabiak, N (Издательство "Научный консультант", 2019)
    The paper is dedicated to the questions of the reflection of national identity in the headlines of newspapers Komsomol'skaya Pravda – Moscow, Izvestiya and Literaturnaya Gazeta for the period from 1st January 2017 until 1st July 2018, drawing upon examples of winged words adapted from Soviet films. Specific winged phrases considered uniquely reflective of Russian culture are highlighted. An attempt is made to explain the main reasons behind winged phrases transformations. The paper stresses the value of learning winged phrases from Soviet films in practical classes of Russian taught as a foreign language.
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    Building Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)
    Foley, B ; Arnold, J ; Coto-Solano, R ; Durantin, G ; Ellison, TM ; van Esch, D ; Heath, S ; Kratochvíl, F ; Maxwell-Smith, Z ; Nash, D ; Olsson, O ; Richards, M ; San, N ; Stoakes, H ; Thieberger, N ; Wiles, J (ISCA, 2018)
    Machine learning has revolutionized speech technologies for major world languages, but these technologies have generally not been available for the roughly 4,000 languages with populations of fewer than 10,000 speakers. This paper describes the development of ELPIS, a pipeline which language documentation workers with minimal computational experience can use to build their own speech recognition models, resulting in models being built for 16 languages from the Asia-Pacific region. ELPIS puts machine learning speech technologies within reach of people working with languages with scarce data, in a scalable way. This is impactful since it enables language communities to cross the digital divide, and speeds up language documentation. Complete automation of the process is not feasible for languages with small quantities of data and potentially large vocabularies. Hence our goal is not full automation, but rather to make a practical and effective workflow that integrates machine learning technologies.
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    Nasal aerodynamics and coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance
    STOAKES, H ; Fletcher, J ; Butcher, AR ; Carignan, C ; Tyler, M (ASSTA, 2016-12-06)
    Nasal phonemes are well represented within the lexicon of BininjKunwok.1 Thisstudyexaminesintervocalic,wordmedial nasals and reports patterns of coarticulation using a Smooth- ing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA). This allows for detailed comparisons of peak nasal airflow across six female speakers of the language. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalisation and greater carryover into a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed for coronals when compared to the onset of oral closure in the nasal, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. The velar place of articulation is the exception to this pattern with some limited anticipatory nasalisation. The SSANOVA has shown to be an appropriate technique for quantifying these patterns and dynamic speech data in general.
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    Multilingualism in Cyberspace - Longevity for Documentation of Small Languages
    Thieberger, N (Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, 2012)
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    Japanese Vowel Devoicing Modulates Perceptual Epenthesis
    Kilpatrick, A ; Kawahara, S ; Bundgaard-Nielsen, R ; Baker, B ; Fletcher, J ; Epps, J ; Wolfe, J ; Jones, C (Australian Speech Science and Technology Association, 2018)
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    Phrasing and constituent boundaries in Lifou French
    Fletcher, J ; Torres, C ; Wigglesworth, G ; Calhoun, S ; Escudero, P ; Tabain, M ; Warren, P (Australasian Speech Science and Technology Australia (ASSTA), 2019)
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    Predictability, Word Frequency and Japanese Perceptual Epenthesis
    Kilpatrick, A ; Kawahara, S ; Bundgaard-Nielsen, R ; Baker, B ; Fletcher, J ; Calhoun, S ; Escudero, P ; TABAIN, M ; Warren, P (Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., 2019)
    Speakers typically invest less effort in the articulation of sounds and words that are highly predictable from their contexts. Recent research reveals a perceptual corollary to this behaviour, showing that listeners pay less attention to acoustic signal in predictable contexts. The present paper expands on this finding by testing the acceptability and discriminability of sequences of speech with varying levels of predictability. Stimuli are contrast pairs and are either phonotactically attested or else contain an illicit nonhomorganic consonant cluster. Such clusters violate Japanese phonotactics and have been found to elicit perceptual epenthesis in Japanese listeners. The results show that unattested consonant clusters are perceived as more acceptable in high-frequency sequences than in low-frequency sequences.
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    Acoustic correlates of lexical stress in Wubuy
    Baker, B ; Bundgaard-Nielsen, R ; Babinski, S ; Fletcher, J ; Calhoun, S ; Escudero, P ; TABAIN, M ; Warren, P (Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., 2019)
    We examined the acoustic correlates of lexical stress in the non-Pama-Nyungan language Wubuy (Northern Territory, Australia). We tested two hypotheses about stress: that stress is determined by (1) a combination of syllable position in prosodic word and quantity sensitivity, or (2) by position alone. To test these hypotheses, we elicited trisyllabic noun roots differing in position of heavy syllables in frame-final environments from 3 speakers. We found that both position and predicted stress based on prior phonological descriptions could account for many correlates (segment and syllable duration, f0, intensity, vowel formants) although overall syllable position appeared to account for more of the variance.
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    The effects of mp3 compression on acoustic measurements of fundamental frequency and pitch range
    Fuchs, R ; Maxwell, O (ISCA, 2016)
    Recordings for acoustic research should ideally be made in a lossless format. However, in some cases pre-existing data may be available in a lossy format such as mp3, prompting the question in how far this compromises the accuracy of acoustic measurements. In order to determine whether this is the case, we compressed 10 recordings of read speech in different compression rates (16-320 kbps), and reconverted them to wav in order to examine the effect of compression on commonly used suprasegmental measures of fundamental frequency (f0), pitch range and level. Results suggest that at compression rates between 56 and 320 kbps, measures of f0and most measures of pitch range and level remain reliable, with mean errors below 2% and often better than that. The skewness of the distribution of f0measurements, however, shows much greater measurement errors, with mean errors of 6.9%-7.6% at compression rates between 96 kbps and 320 kbps, and 44.8% at 16 kbps. We conclude that mp3 compressed recordings can be subjected to the acoustic measurements tested here. Nevertheless, the indeterminacy added by mp3 compression needs to be taken into account when interpreting measurements.