Timing variations of frequent utterances occurring in a very large corpus of spontaneous Japanese conversational speech
Nick J. H. Campbell · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2006
A corpus of spontaneous conversational Japanese speech was collected from volunteer subjects who wore high-quality head-mounted microphones and recorded their daily spoken interactions to minidisk over a period of 5 years. All recordings were transcribed and tagged according to interlocutor type, and a portion representing about 10% was further annotated for speech-act, speaker-state, emotion, and speaking style. This paper presents timing data from the corpus, showing how the same utterance can vary according to speaking style and other factors. It presents the hundred most common utterances in the corpus and relates their durations to spectral and prosodic characteristics that vary according to affect, attitude, intention, and relationship with the listener.