Clarification of the phonetic characteristics of filled pauses based upon the analysis of spontaneous speech corpus

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26284062
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Maekawa Kikuo 大学共同利用機関法人人間文化研究機構国立国語研究所, 音声言語研究領域, 教授 (20173693)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 森 大毅 宇都宮大学, 工学(系)研究科(研究院), 准教授 (10302184) ; Rose Ralph 早稲田大学, 理工学術院, 准教授 (30404916) ; 河原 英紀 和歌山大学, 学内共同利用施設等, 名誉教授 (40294300) ; 渡辺 美知子 大学共同利用機関法人人間文化研究機構国立国語研究所, コーパス開発センター, プロジェクト非常勤研究員 (60470027)
• Research Collaborator: Tseng Shu-Chuan 中央研究院, 語言学研究所, Research fellow
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: フィラー / 自発音声 / F0抽出 / 日本語 / 英語 / 中国語 / 声質

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The following research was conducted as planned in the research proposal. As for Japanese, 1) Systematic difference of voice quality was found between the vowels in filled pauses and ordinary lexical items. As for English, 2) factors affecting the probability of filled pauses in clause-initial position were extracted, and 3) differences of filled-pause usage between the English native speakers and Japanese learners of English were extracted, and analyzed with respect to proficiency levels of the learners. As for Chinese, 4) the same analysis as in 1) above revealed basically the same results as in Japanese, but language-dependent differences were also found with respect to the change in the vowel color, for example. Lastly, 5) a new computational algorithm that can enable reliable extraction of the speech fundamental frequency　(F0) information from the vowels having strongly creaky and/or breathy voice qualities.

Free Research Field

音声学