We are pleased to invite you to the linguistics seminar Constructing a speech banana for Thai consonants on Friday, 21 August.
Keynote speaker:
Chutamanee Onsuwan
Centre of Excellence in Intelligent Informatics, Speech and Language Technology and Service Innovation (CILS)
Thammasat University, Thailand
A “speech banana” is a banana-shaped plot of speech power distribution. It shows speech sounds spoken with normal loudness in terms of frequency and intensity level. Speech bananas have been mainly proposed for Indo-European languages. This work describes ongoing research in constructing a speech banana for Thai, a non-Indo-European language. Speech materials are taken from 11 Thais (males and females). Comparisons are carried out to examine if there is any difference in speech power distribution of 21 consonants from male and female voices. The findings suggest that significant acoustic differences associated with male and female voices should be incorporated into the speech banana representation.
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Dr Chutamanee is a lecturer in linguistics at Thammasat University, Thailand. She has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and her research interests are in the areas of phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.
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Contact: Professor Ronan Reilly, Maynooth University (ronan.reilly@mu.ie)