Questions tagged [spoken-language]
A modality of language, contrasted with written language, whistled language or sign language.
72 questions
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What free objective tools can be used for assessing pronunciation?
I'm also interested in fluency and intonation.
Any insights will be wonderful.
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Automatic annotation of *non-native* semi-spontaneous speech
I wonder if there is any tool for automatically annotating L2-semi-spontaneous speech (practically said, to produce a TextGrid file from a sound file (.wav) and a text file containing the ...
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Does the concept of slang exist in cultures without established written or formal education traditions?
In English and, presumably, many of the world's other commonly spoken languages, there exists a rough category of words considered slang. This concept is not quite the same as taboo (many slang words ...
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Isn't it misleading to call written representations of spoken languages as written languages?
In the following sentences I would refer to anything that can be used to denote something as a symbol.
Any language uses some kind of symbol to denote different things. I presume that any language ...
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Relationship of spoken and written language and truth of sentences
I am not entirely sure if this is the appropriate site and whether these are the appropriate tags for this topic, so if that is not the case, please feel free to let me know.
I never thought twice ...
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French language : is it possible to use a possessive adjective earlier than the name it refers to? [closed]
I have posted the same question on the French language Stackexchange, and I have been referred to post it here too.
A phrase said by Mireille left me dumbfounded:
Bénédicte et ses filles ont ...
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Speed listening
I have just heard that there are people out there (mostly blind people) using screen readers at overspeed, achieving speech rates twice as high as usual, and even higher.
What I want to know is: Are ...
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Can anyone help me to resolve an issue relating to F0 and audio data?
I made a textgrid of the sentence "I quite like cheese a lot." and created three tiers and marked the sentence, word (cheese) and the nucleus of cheese to examine the f0. Then I used a ...
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How did the j get the dʒ sound?
The j getting the dʒ is very weird, how did the letter j get the dʒ sound?
Why not a /j/ sound as in "yes"?
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Are there languages without fillers like "um" or "uh"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsMWbVrjucg&t=34s
According to this video (0:55) almost every language has those speech disfluencies. But ALMOST. Do languages exist that have no such sounds for ...
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Do any languages use words like particles to represent commas, periods, hyphens, quotes, parentheses, etc.?
Wondering if any languages use words, particles, or other speakable markers to represent punctuation like periods, commas, hyphens, quotes, parentheses, question marks, exclamation marks, or ...
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Duplex perception experiment - Can I try it on my own?
I was reading about speech perception over headphones, “duplex perception” (Lieberman et al., 1981) — who note that when a speech stimulus was split into two parts and presented to different ears over ...
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What is the linguistic term for sounds such as 'um', 'uh', 'like', etc. when used to control the rhythm of speech?
Sounds such as 'um' and 'uh' are common in speech when the speaker needs to prolong a sentence or otherwise control the rhythm of the sentence. I also hear these sounds used to convey indifference or ...
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Are there any constraints on how dead languages could have been spoken?
Considering written languages that we know, restricting ourselves to alphabetical languages if helpful: Can we make any general statements or assert any constraints on how a language could have ever ...
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Evidence for segmental phonology in the acoustic speech signal
What evidence for segmental phonology could be found in the acoustic speech signal?
I think the parameters of acoustic speech signals include f0, amplitude, duration, wave form, etc., which are ...
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Does a voice activated conversation with an AI constitute as natural speech?
Since AI bots fulfil all the requirements of speech, but don't fulfil the criteria of 'natural speech' production since it wasn't done impromptu and wasn't developed naturally, do you guys think that ...
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How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake?
How do you tell a spelling mistake from a grammar mistake? For example:
Your the best.
This iz the end.
I likes music.
She preatend to be asleep.
One method is to read the erroneous sentence aloud (...
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Which language has the most distinct written and spoken forms?
I know about Persian as an example.
For example, we have "خانه" (transliterated as Khaneh, which means home) for the written form. But we say "خونه" (Khooneh) for the spoken form ...
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Term for Regional "Words per Minute"
Is there a term for the variation in how many words per minute is spoken on average by people in various regions of the country/world? A focus group mentioned they wished our Tech Support personnel ...
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Is there a word for "mouth transitions" which describes the movement of a mouth which is saying one word, but preparing for the next?
I think I can produce every individual phoneme in standard-ish spoken Mandarin.
However, if I want to speak fluently I have to watch videos of people speaking and closely watch their mouths, because ...
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Innovations in speech rhythm and tone
I enjoy language columns, such as Johnson in The Economist, which discuss the evolution of language. But I notice that such columns tend to focus only on certain dimensions of language: new words, ...
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How are the Ogham stones inscribed?
I earlier asked How to convert Old Irish Latin script to Ogham? and am not quite complete with the answer. I have a similar question still trying to dig into how to build an Ogham generator. But ...
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What is the difference between an accent and mispronunciation?
I listened this morning to a radio discussion about accents (French radio France Inter, Doit-on avoir honte de notre accent ?). It was about accents from various regions in France (and abroad) and how ...
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Hesitation markers like "uh, ehm" versus repetition
When listening to my 5-year-old son telling me a little story about dinosaurs, he used a lot of repetition in the following way:
"The triceratops… the triceratops used his horns… the triceratops ...
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Slang, colloquial use, informal speech, etc [closed]
Background
The question is motivated by this post in the Russian forum, where the answers repeatedly refer to verb пересечёмся as "young people's slang" or "teenage slang". (пересечёмся = "we'll cross ...
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How to make a bilabial approximant sound?
In the IPA chart, there are some white areas with no text. These are where a sound can exist, but it has not been found in any known language. (The gray areas are where humans are incapable of making ...
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Term for conversation where each person speaks a different language, while understanding each other
I would like to know if there is a technical (or common) term for the type of bilingual (or multilingual) conversation described in the title. For example, one person could be speaking French, while ...
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Estimating the number of words in a language before invention of alphabet
Here is my question from the title:
Given a (natural) language with its writing system based on an
alphabet, are there any theories giving (quantitative) estimates on
the number of words the ...
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resonance factors
The wiki entry for resonance lists 7 factors that contribute to it:
chest
larynx
nasal cavity
oral cavity
pharynx
sinuses
trachea
Given one’s base pitch production, I thought that the oral cavity is ...
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Is audio understanding in bad conditions (e.g. at a noisy market) different between languages?
I consider myself almost fluent in English, but have trouble understanding when the words are blended together. This includes for example noisy places, song lyrics, or accents. In Czech, I have no ...
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Rejecting writing down a language for various reasons
I remembered reading somewhere about a language that its speakers believe the written words are sacred (or some other reasons) they chose to refrain from putting spoken words into written forms even ...
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One-to-one speech conversation dataset (Recorded over microphone)
I need a publically available one-to-one speech conversation dataset recorded over the microphone, e.g., interview scenario or enquiry or call centre call answering.
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How to convert CHAT to TextGrid in a batch?
Siarad corpus is a corpus of spoken Welsh (~40 hours, all transcribed, glossed and translated!). I want to analyze some conversations using Praat. Praat uses the TextGrid format, but the Siarad corpus ...
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Words per minute - language list?
I have an idea on how fast a Dutch speaker speaks:
130 wpm = medium
160 wpm = fast
100 wpm = slow
I'd like to have that same knowledge about other languages.
Is there a list somewhere that ...
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Libs or APIs for removing background noise from voice input?
The effect of background noise on speech recognition is not good.
Are there libs or APIs for removing background noise from voice input?
Ideally language-agnostic or tuned for the top 100+ languages,...
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Does (or should) the terms "spoken language" and "speech" include signed language?
And if not, is there a term, accepted by both the Deaf and linguistic communities, that includes both spoken and signed language, in contrast to written language?
Reputable linguistic sources, ...
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Do any languages not have the concept of "words"?
I'm wondering if there are any languages that are basically just streams of basic sound blocks, like letters or syllables, and they don't have words.
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What's the difference between articulatory features and articulatory gestures?
I'm confused about those two terms, but based on my understanding articulatory gestures are represented by the vocal tract variables and articulatory features include all units are involved in ...
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Are there any languages that have words for open and closing quotation marks in speech?
It seems to me that most languages have some way of bounding quotations in written form. European languages have their apostrophe quotes and angle-brackets, while eastern Asian languages have those ...
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In spoken English, is there a clear preference for using contractions?
In spoken English, is there a clear preference for using contractions? Does it depend on the locale? I am mostly interested in Midwestern and Northeastern USA, but I would also care to know how it is ...
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Why is spoken Chinese so fast paced?
I'm fan of watching subbed Chinese movies and series and with them sometimes happens something that very rarely happens with movies or series from other languages that's the fact that I haven't been ...
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Acoustic signal to phones?
I am currently trying to understand speech perception, and are at the moment a bit stuck.. I seem to understand how the ear process incoming sound, but i don't understand the concept of phones. Why ...
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Why do Korean and Japanese sound similar to each other to native speakers of English?
I don't understand why, but Korean and Japanese sound very similar to me, and also to other native speakers of English. I think I once read a comment saying something like "If it sounds like Japanese ...
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Speech Pathologists and the International Phonetic Alphabet
Do speech therapists and speech pathologists have to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet as part of their profession? They might want to learn it, but my question really is: are they required to ...
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Langue vs parole in Phonetics and Phonology
How could one frame the differences between phonetics and phonology in Saussurian terms? I know langage/langue/parole were not developed to these ends, but this explanation can help me get a handle ...
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Stringed music as a constructed language
I'm working on a concept for a constructed language for a story I'm writing. The people/culture that it's for have no vocal cords and communicate with a combination of body language, tapping/...
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Would Saussure consider sign language as "parole"?
I wonder if sign language would be "parole" according to Saussurian linguistics. After all, parole can be denied as
the "concrete" use of the language, the actual utterances. It
is an external ...
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Speech rate measured in bit/sec
Are there references giving the speech rate measured in bit/sec?
I easily found references on speech rate giving measurement in phones/sec, syllables/sec or words/sec. Are there references giving the ...
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How to (automatically ) detect the steady-part of vowels?
Please I need your help ASAP,
I need to segment an audio corpus of 4 hours , and I need a tool or script to detect the steady part of vowels and place the boundaries .
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Praat Script: How to Reverse Selected Sound File?
I want to reverse a sound file using Praat. I tried to figure out the way to do it and found that there's a shortcut Ctrl+R in the Edit menu. but I want to do the same thing using the script.
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