Automatic classification of stop realisation with wav2vec2.0

Modern phonetic research regularly makes use of automatic tools for the annotation of speech data, however few tools exist for the annotation of many variable phonetic phenomena. At the same time, pre-trained self-supervised models, such as wav2vec2.0, have been shown to perform well at speech classification tasks and latently encode fine-grained phonetic information. We demonstrate that wav2vec2.0 models can be trained to automatically classify stop burst presence with high accuracy in both English and Japanese, robust across both finely-curated and unprepared speech corpora. Patterns of variability in stop realisation are replicated with the automatic annotations, and closely follow those of manual annotations. These results demonstrate the potential of pre-trained speech models as tools for the automatic annotation and processing of speech corpus data, enabling researchers to `scale-up' the scope of phonetic research with relative ease.

Exploring the anatomy of articulation rate in spontaneous English speech: relationships between utterance length effects and social factors

Speech rate has been shown to vary across social categories such as gender, age, and dialect, while also being conditioned by properties of speech planning. The effect of utterance length, where speech rate is faster and less variable for longer utterances, has also been shown to reduce the role of social factors once it has been accounted for, leaving unclear the relationship between social factors and speech production in conditioning speech rate. Through modelling of speech rate across 13 English speech corpora, it is found that utterance length has the largest effect on speech rate, though this effect itself varies little across corpora and speakers. While age and gender also modulate speech rate, their effects are much smaller in magnitude. These findings suggest utterance length effects may be conditioned by articulatory and perceptual constraints, and that social influences on speech rate should be interpreted in the broader context of how speech rate variation is structured.