Papers by Jonathan Howell
Revisiting English word stress and rhythm in the post-nuclear domain
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2016
Evaluation of web speech and lab speech for automatic classification of prosody
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2014
I present a new approach to research on meaning and prosody, using speech "harvested" from the we... more I present a new approach to research on meaning and prosody, using speech "harvested" from the web. I advocate a pluralistic view of linguistic data and methodology, within which web-harvested speech plays a vital role. I show that webharvested speech can be used effectively with computational and experimental methods on the one hand, and qualitative, impressionistic study on the other.
Semantic theory predicts four different focus configurations for a pair of adjacent words: early,... more Semantic theory predicts four different focus configurations for a pair of adjacent words: early, late, broad and double focus. We report on a production study which confirms that speakers make a significant, though non-obligatory, distinction between the four categories. The distinction is observed in yes/no question and so cannot be associated with a specific intonational tune. The results also fail to support theories of focus projection and uniquely syntagmatic models of prominence.
This paper describes experiments on gathering spoken-language data on the web that bears on issue... more This paper describes experiments on gathering spoken-language data on the web that bears on issues of the phonetics-phonology and semanticspragmatics of intonation. The target data are tokens of fixed word strings like "than I did", where intonation varies in a way which correlates with grammatical and pragmatic context. In a web harvest procedure, audio files were identified using a search engine based in speech-to-text, downloaded, and cut to a relevant segment under program control. In an application of such a database, an SVM classifier was trained to make a grammatically determined distinction in intonation based on purely acoustic cues. Sources of error in the retrieval are quantified.
Effect of “only” on prosodic focus marking
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2015
will describe the project organization, lessons learned, prospects for the web-dataset methodolog... more will describe the project organization, lessons learned, prospects for the web-dataset methodology, and the like.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2006
Tongue dorsum location and tongue root retraction in alveolar and palatal clicks in the endangered language N/uu
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2006
Tongue dorsum location and tongue root retraction in alveolar and palatal clicks in the endangere... more Tongue dorsum location and tongue root retraction in alveolar and palatal clicks in the endangered language N/uu. [The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 120, 3377 (2006)]. Amanda L. Miller, Johanna Brugman, Jonathan Howell, Bonny Sands. Abstract. ...
The sentence (1) contains an example of an adnominal emphatic reflexive (adnominal ER), namely hi... more The sentence (1) contains an example of an adnominal emphatic reflexive (adnominal ER), namely himself.
Proceedings of Acoustics Week in Canada. Canadian Acoustics, 2011
The Penn Forced Aligner automates the alignment process using the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HT... more The Penn Forced Aligner automates the alignment process using the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). The core of Prosodylab-Aligner is align. py, a script which performs acoustic model training and alignment. This script automates calls to HTK and SoX, an open-source command-line tool which is capable of resampling audio. The included README file provides instructions for installing HTK and SoX on Linux and Mac OS X, and can also be run on Windows. During training, the model is initialized with flat-start ...
Recent by Jonathan Howell
Acoustic classification of focus: On the web and in the lab
We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested... more We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust acoustic classifiers include paradigmatic (i.e., un-normalized), non-intonational acoustic measures (duration and relative formant frequencies from single segments). These acoustic cues are also significant predictors of human listeners’ classification, offering new evidence in the debate whether prominence is mainly encoded by pitch or by other cues, and the role that utterance-normalization plays when looking at non-pitch cues such as duration.
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Papers by Jonathan Howell
Recent by Jonathan Howell