Speech Prosody 2014

Hyperarticulation in Lombard speech: A preliminary study

Juraj Simko, Stefan Benus and Martti Vainio
Over the last century researchers collected a considerable amount of data reflecting properties of the Lombard speech, i.e., speech in a loud environment. The documented phenomena include effects on intensity, fundamental frequency, spectral tilt, speech rate and articulationm. Relatively little attention has been paid to the effects on relative extent of movement of individual articulators. In an attempt to fill in this gap we present a preliminary analysis of EMA data collected in increasing levels of babble noise. We introduce HH-index as a measure of overall relative activity of articulators. Our results indicate a non-linearity of the effect of noise on articulatory movement and quantitatively different effects on the movement extent for different groups of articulators. The effects of noise are compared with those brought out by other techniques for eliciting articulatory variation. We also discuss possible application of Lombard speech as an elicitation paradigm for studies of hyperarticulation.