Departmental Seminar on 25 March 2009

Title: Phonetic Study of Paralinguistic Information
Speaker:Kikuo Maekawa (Department of Language Research, The National Institute for Japanese Language)
Date: March 25, 2009 (Wednesday)
Time: 2:30pm - 4:00pm
Venue: AG 507, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Abstract:

Phonetic manifestation of paralinguistic information (PI) like speaker's attitude and intention is a unique property of speech communication. Production and perception of six PI types were examined using Japanese. In speech production, acoustic and articulatory analyses revealed that speech signal and the underlying articulatory gesture differed systematically and considerably under the specification of PI. Further it was shown that the planning of PI could be classified into two different processes; one that makes reference to phonological structure of utterance, and the other that does not. As for perception, identification experiments followed by MDS analysis revealed that native subjects could identify the PI types correctly in three dimensional perceptual space, and, regression analysis revealed high correlation between the acoustic measures and the perceptual space. Lastly, cross-linguistic perception experiments followed by MDS analyses revealed partly language-dependent nature of PI perception. This finding was in congruence with the finding that production of PI makes partial reference to the phonological structure of utterance.

About the speaker:

Kikuo Maekawa, Leader of the Corpus Compilation Group in the Department of Language Research at the National Institute for Japanese Language, received his PhD in linguistics from Sophia University in 1983. His research areas are mainly on experimental phonetics, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. Some recent topics he is currently working on include the design and compilation of a balanced corpus of written Japanese, the analysis of spontaneous speech corpus, the analysis of language variation using spontaneous speech corpus, the analysis of the transmission mechanism of the paralinguistic information in speech, and the prosodic structure of Japanese