LINGUIST List 5.1124

Fri 14 Oct 1994

FYI: Cahiers de l'ILSL, Dutch grad school, Speech database

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Cahiers de l'ILSL (Inst. de Ling. et des sc. du Lgge, UNILausanne)
2. "Marleen van de Wiel", dutch graduate school
3. , EUR-ACCOR multi-sensor speech database on CD-ROM

Cahiers de l'Institut de Linguistique et des Sciences du langage,
Universite de Lausanne, CILSL no4, 1994, "Travaux d'etudiants" (224p.) has
appeared.
Contents:
J.-M. Adam: Presentation.
K. Stransky: L'invention de la langue tcheque et les paradoxes de l'identiti.
M. Caffari: Peut-on changer la langue? La ling. sov. et le conc. d'intervention.
J.-F. Aenishanslin: Speculer - sur Rorty.
L. Kaufmann: Histoire et linguistique. De Gaulle au forum d'Alger, microlecture.
J. Meizoz: Un recit qui brule: la rumeur (sur Septembre ardent de W. Faulkner)
G. Revaz: La promesse de mariage. Le Cid, Andromaque, Don Juan: analyse
sociodisc.
E. Honore: Histoire, roman, description: enjeux de 2 portraits dans 93 de
V. Hugo.
M. Caraion: Stratigies descriptives chez A. Cohen.
O. Blanc: L'usage des onomatopies chez Celine, le seul philosophe
"pratrabroumm".
J. Pfister: La langue et le style chez N. Sarraute. L'exemple du planetarium.
F. Epars: La conjonction "mais" dan quelques poemes de Rimbaud et Baudelaire.
L. Gajo: L'acquisition de "c'est", "c'est...qui/que". Etude de cas.
This issue -as well as any of the 14 previous ones- can be ordered from:
Cahiers de l'ILSL, ILSL, Faculti des lettres, Universite de Lausanne, CH -
1015 Lausanne. (Tel. & Fax: 021 692 30 55, Email: ycruchauulys.unil.ch)
We'll then send it postage-free with its bill (15.- Swiss Francs per copy).

second announcement

DUTCH GRADUATE SCHOOL IN LINGUISTICS
Winterschool January 1995

>From January 9 to January 20 1995
the Dutch Graduate School in Linguistics
organizes a winterschool for junior researchers
(PhD students and Aio/Oio's)

LOCATION
Tilburg University, Holland.

PROGRAM

Lecturers:

Helen de Hoop (Groningen)
 'Quantification and focus: between Syntax and Semantics'
Gereon Mueller (Tuebingen)
 'Cyclicity and economy: Movement theory in the Minimalist program'
Clive Perdue (Paris)
 'Functional approaches to second language acquisition'
Deirdre Wilson (UCL, London)
 'A relevance-theoretic approach to pragmatics'
Bill Philip (Utrecht)
 'Universal quantification for the preschooler'
Gertjan van Noord & Gosse Bouma (Groningen)
 'Constraint-based grammar: current issues in HPSG'
Wolfgang Dressler (Wenen)
 'Natural morphology and language acquisition'
Michael Tanenhaus (Rochester)
 'Constraint-based lexicalist approaches to syntactic ambiguity
 resolution'
Wayne Ward (Pittsburgh)
 'Automatic sentence comprehension'
Koenraad de Smedt (Leiden/Bergen)
 'Language production: A computational psycholinguistics perspective'
Sam Rosenthall (SOAS, London)
 'Syllabe structure and optimality theory'
Michael Kenstowicz (MIT)
 'Issues in optimality theory'
Arthur Dirksen (Utrecht)
 'Declarative metrical phonology and speech synthesis'
Jonathan Grainger (Parijs)
 'Visual word recognition'
Suzanne Romaine (Oxford)
 'Pidginization and creolization'
T. Mark Ellison (Edinburgh)
 'A computable framework for constraint-based phonology'
Peter Auer (Hamburg)
 'Language variation: phonology, syntax and discourse'
Edwin Williams (Princeton) (not yet confirmed)
 'Topics in syntactic theory' (not yet confirmed)

Schedule:

WEEK 1: January 9 to January 13, 1995

 9.30 - 12.00 Williams Wilson Van Noord/Bouma
13.00 - 15.30 De Hoop Perdue Dressler
16.00 - 18.30 Mueller Philip Auer

WEEK 2: January 16 to January 20, 1995

 9.30 - 12.00 Tanenhaus Rosenthall Ellison
13.00 - 15.30 Ward Kenstowicz Romaine
16.00 - 18.30 de Smedt Dirksen Grainger

LODGING
There are some lodging arrangements made in Tilburg. Please mention
on your registration form which nights you wish to make use of the
lodging arrangements at Tilburg.

COSTS
For each week the costs are Dfl. 350,-
This price includes a lodging arrangement for one week.
When you wish to stay from Sunday January 8 till Sunday January 22,
the price is Dfl. 700,-, including lodging.

REGISTRATION
You can enroll by sending all requested information to:
CLSkub.nl

name: (last)....(first)......
address:.....................
zip code/city:...............
country:.....................
e-mail:......................
phone:.......................
fax:.........................

wishes to register for the following courses:
.............................................
.............................................
.............................................
.............................................

wishes to make use of the lodging arrangements at Tilburg:
() from Sunday January 8 till Sunday January 15, 1995
() from Sunday January 15 till Sunday January 22, 1995
() both weeks, from Sunday January 8 till Sunday January 22, 1995

Please return this registration form before November 1, 1994.

INFORMATION
Please contact CLSkub.nl for further information.
Available are course descriptions and recommended literature.

Dear colleague,

re: EUR-ACCOR database on CD-ROM

There are negotiations currently underway with the EEC to make available the
EUR-ACCOR database on CD-ROM. We will start with the English data and intend
to extend this to the other ACCOR languages later. At this stage we need to
have an indication of the level of interest from the speech community in such
a database. Please respond by email indicating whether you and/or your
colleagues would be interested in obtaining such a database and we will place
you on the mailing list for further information.

Description of the EUR-ACCOR database

EUR-ACCOR is a unique acoustic and articulatory database recorded as part of
the ESPRIT- ACCOR project investigating cross-language acoustic-articulatory
correlations in coarticulatory processes. Data from seven languages were record
ed: Catalan, English, French, German, Irish Gaelic, Italian and Swedish. In
order to allow for cross-language comparisons, particular attention was paid
to the adoption of a common methodology, i.e., standardised investigation tools
, comparable data corpora.
All data were recorded with the Reading University-IBM multichannel
workstation which enables simultaneous digital recording of the acoustic
signal and up to five additional channels for physiological and aerodynamic
data. The following transducers were used: electropalatograph
(for measuring the timing and location of tongue contacts with the palate),
pneumotachograph with Rothenberg mask (for recording volume velocity of air
flow from nose and mouth) and laryngograph (for recording details of vocal
fold vibration). The database is currently on tape streamers (about 12.5
Gbytes total).
A common corpus was used for all languages (with few exceptions when sequences
were not phonotactically permissible).
The main sets of speech material were as follows:

1. Nonsense items:
(a) Vowels /i, a, u/ in isolation.
(b) VCV sequences, where C= /p, b, t, d, k, s, z, n, l, S, tS/ and the
sequences /kl, st/; V = /i, u, a/
(NB: /a/: becomes schwa when unstressed in English, /z/ and /S/ do not occur
in Swedish, /s/ is restricted in German and /tS/ in German and French).

2. Real words:
These match the VCV nonsense sequences above as closely as possible.
Thus nonsense item /iti/ is matched by English "meaty", /uti/ in Italian is
matched by "muti" etc.

3. Sentences:
 Short sentences constructed in each language to illustrate the main
connected speech processes in that language such as assimilations, weak forms
etc. Thus in English, sentences such as "Fred can go, Susan can't go and Linda
 is uncertain" appear.
In some of the languages items from the real words corpus appear also in the
sentences.

Five speakers from each language recorded a total of 10 repetitions of the full
 corpus. Five of these repetitions have Electropalatography,
electrolaryngography and audio signal data. The other five repetitions have
Electropalatography, electrolaryngography, audio signal, and pneumotachography
(separate nasal and oral airflow velocity).

High quality recordings were made with a Sennheiser MKH 40 P48 microphone.
The sampling rates were the following:
Speech signal: 20,000 Hz
Laryngograph: 10,000 Hz
Oral air flow: 500 Hz
Nasal air flow: 500 Hz
EPG data: 200 Hz

Recent publications:

Marchal, A. and Hardcastle, W.J. (1993) ACCOR: Instrumentation and database for
 the cross-language study of coarticulation. Language and Speech, 36, 137-153.

Marchal, A., Hardcastle, W., Hoole, P., Farnetani, E., Ni Chasaide, A.,
Schmidbauer, O., Galiano-Ronda, I., Engstrand, O. and Recasens, D. (EUR-ACCOR)
(1991) The design of a multichannel database. Proceedings of the XIIth
International Congress of phonetic Sciences, Aix-en-Provence, August 19th-24th,
 vol 5, 422-425.

Nicolaidis, K., Hardcastle, W.J., Marchal, A. and Nguyen-Trong, N. (1993)
Comparing phonetic, articulatory, acoustic and aerodynamic signal
representations. In M. Cooke, S. Beet and M. Crawford (eds.) Visual
Representations of Speech Signals. John Wiley: Chichester. pp 55-82.