Event

The Smooth Syllable Redundancy Hypothesis: Why is Prosody?

Matthew Aylett

ICSI and the AMI Project

Tuesday, May 03, 2005
12:30 pm

Syllabic language redundancy (the predictability of a syllable given its context) has been shown to have a strong inverse relationship with syllabic duration. This relationship is predicted by the smooth signal redundancy hypothesis (SSRH), which argues that an inverse relationship between language redundancy and acoustic redundancy makes speech more robust in a noisy environment. Prosodic prominence seems to shadow this relationship suggesting that prosody may be a linguistic means for implementing this robust communication.

I will present duration and spectral results to support this hypothesis and also talk about the difficulties of measuring large corpora for duration and acoustic factors for this type of phonetic study. Finally I will consider of the possible engineering applications of the SSRH.

Brief Biography

Matthew Aylett is currently visiting ICSI under the European AMI grant. He gained his PhD in Phonetics at Edinburgh University in 2000 (after taking a masters in Speech Technology). He then worked as a post doc at the Edinburgh's Centre of Speech Technology Research in ASR before being asked to join Rhetorical Systems in 2000 as a core engineer. Over the next five years he worked in Speech Synthesis but found it difficult to kick the addiction of academic research, so in 2003 he began working part time. Now currently working only one day a week for industry he is clearly losing his fight against the potential economic disaster of a full time research career.