Abstract
In spoken conversations, inhalations are associated with the initiation of speech. In multiparty conversations, inhalations are crucial as they signal turn-taking. However, in read speech, inhalations are not considered as holding any crucial information and hence are often omitted from the analysis, marked with a <sil> annotation. In this work, we demonstrate that the acoustics of inhalations may not be completely ‘silent’ and contain useful cues correlated with the contiguous linguistic sounds. Using a read speech database of Mizo, we show that the acoustics of inhalations show prominent anticipatory effects and are often correlated with the formants of the following vowel sounds.
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Sarmah, P., Lalhminghlui, W., Sharma, N.K. (2023). Sounds of <sil>ence: Acoustics of Inhalation in Read Speech. In: Karpov, A., Samudravijaya, K., Deepak, K.T., Hegde, R.M., Agrawal, S.S., Prasanna, S.R.M. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14338. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48309-7_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48309-7_26
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