LINGUIST List 2.341

Wednesday, 10 July 1991

Qs: Mandarin, Carleton U, Vowel tensing, MacSpeech Lab II

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1. Hiromi Morikawa, Utterance segmentation in Mandarin
2. Richard Coates, Carleton University
3. AVERY D ANDREWS, Query on English Vowel Tensing
4. Ralf Thiede, MacSpeech Lab II

We'd like some help from anyone who has transcribed strings of speech
and/or conversations in Mandarin. What criteria did you use to identify
utterance boundaries? Rising/falling intonations and pauses of certain
length are commonly used for segmenting English speech into utterances.
But we are not sure if that can be applied to Mandarin as well.
Our language samples in Mandarin are maternal speech to infants, and
they include plenty of incomplete sentences, words in isolation,
interjections, etc.
We'd appreciate any suggestions.
Hiromi Morikawa
hiromipsych.stanford.edu

Does anyone have an email address for anyone in the Dept of Anthropology
and Sociology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada? Thanks if so.
Richard Coates
(richardcuk.ac.susx.syma)

I'd be very appreciating to be told of any work that has been done since
SPE on the history of the vowel tesing rule in `vary'~`variety',
`iran'~iranian', etc. Thanks.
 Avery Andrews (ada612csc.anu.edu.au)

In response to Espen Ore <fafeonobergen>: I am currently trying to sur-
vey what hardware / sortware packages are available for analyzing speech
on computers. (This got started when I applied for a grant and realized
how difficult it was to make an informed choice since I did not know all
the products, and neither did anyone else I asked.) I received a gener-
ous demo package from GW Instruments including digitized sample record-
ings on disk and manuals. The demo plotted all the analyses on screen
which the manual mentioned, so I do not know what trouble your colleague
ran into "plotting... basic frequencies in spoken words." If the prob-
lem was using the printer as a plotter for the spectographs: I was told
when I called the company for a chat that the program is not compatible
with SC-series Apple Laserwriters.
 GW Instruments' address is: 35 Medford St., Sommerville MA 02143.
 Tel: (617) 625-4096
 Fax: (617) 625-1322
This brings up an idea: so far, I have or can get information on:
 SpeechViewer (IBM) [MS-DOS]
 CI-500 Speech Analysis System (SIL) [MS-DOS]
 MacSpeech Lab (GW Instruments) [MacIntosh]
 Voice Navigator (Articulate Systems) [MacIntosh]
 MacRecorder (Farallon) [MacIntosh]
 waves+ (Entropic Speech) [SPARC]
 Digital Ears (Metaresearch) [NeXT]
What else is there? I would like to compile that information, write a
survey and publish it somewhere, and make a short survey available on
LINGUIST some time after the next LSA meeting.
 Ralf Thiede
 U of NC Charlotte