Measuring synchronization among speakers reading together

Authors

  • Fred Cummins School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0020/000020

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that speakers are readily able to synchronize with a co-speaker when reading a prepared text together. The means by which a high degree of synchronization is attained are still unknown. We here present a novel measure of synchrony which allows us to follow the time course of synchronization among two speakers, based on the parallel acoustic signals. The method uses traditional frame-based cepstral features and a slight variant on standard dynamic time-warping. We develop the method based on a novel corpus of synchronous speech, comparing its estimates of synchronicity with hand estimates. The method out-performs laborious manual estimation, and allows us to now begin to study the dynamics of synchroni-zation among speakers.

 

References

Cummins, F. 2003. Practice and performance in speech produced synchronously. Journal of Phonetics 31(2), 139-148.

Cummins, F. 2004. Synchronization among speakers reduces macroscopic temporal variability. Proc. 26th Annl. Meet. Cognitive Science Society, 304-9.

Cummins, F. and Grimaldi, M. and Leonard, T. and Simko, J. 2006. The CHAINS corpus: CHAracterizing INdividual Speakers. Proc. SPECOM’06. To appear.

Dauer, R.M. 1983. Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed. Journal of Phonetics 11, 51-62.

Marslen-Wilson, W. 1973. Linguistic structure and speech shadowing at short latencies. Nature 244, 522-523.

Myers, C. S. and Rabiner, L. R. 1981. A comparative study of several dynamic timewarping algorithms for connected word recognition. The Bell System Technical Journal 60(7): 1389-1409.

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Published

01-01-2006

How to Cite

Measuring synchronization among speakers reading together. (2006). Linguistic Proceedings Series, 1(1), 105-108. https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2006/01/0020/000020