Literature review on prosody reveals the lack of corpora for prosodic studies in Catalan and Spanish. In this paper, we present a corpus intended to fill this gap. The corpus comprises two distinct data-sets, a news subcorpus and a dialogue subcorpus, the latter containing either conversational or task-oriented speech. More than 25 h were recorded by twenty eight speakers per language. Among these speakers, eight were professional (four radio news broadcasters and four advertising actors). The entire material presented here has been transcribed, aligned with the acoustic signal and prosodically annotated. Two major objectives have guided the design of this project: (i) to offer a wide coverage of representative real-life communicative situations which allow for the characterization of prosody in these two languages; and (ii) to conduct research studies which enable us to contrast the speakers different speaking styles and discursive practices. All material contained in the corpus is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

In this work we consider Glissando Corpus—an oral corpus of Catalan and Spanish—and empirically analyze the presence of the four classical linguistic laws (Zipf’s law, Herdan’s law, Brevity law, and Menzerath–Altmann’s law) in oral communication, and further complement this with the analysis of two recently formulated laws: lognormality law and size-rank law. By aligning the acoustic signal of speech production with the speech transcriptions, we are able to measure and compare the agreement of each of these laws when measured in both physical and symbolic units. Our results show that these six laws are recovered in both languages but considerably more emphatically so when these are examined in physical units, hence reinforcing the so-called ‘physical hypothesis’ according to which linguistic laws might indeed have a physical origin and the patterns recovered in written texts would, therefore, be just a byproduct of the regularities already present in the acoustic signals of oral communication.

Large phonetic corpora including both standard and variant transcriptions are available for many languages. However, applications requiring the use of dynamic vocabularies make necessary to transcribe words not present in the dictionary. Also, additional alternative pronunciations to standard forms have shown to improve recognition accuracy. Therefore, new techniques to automatically generate variants in pronunciations have been investigated and proven to be very effective. However, rule-based systems still remain useful to generate standard transcriptions not previously available or to build new corpora, oriented chiefly to synthesis applications. The present paper describes a letter-to-phone conversion system for Spanish designed to supply transcriptions to the flexible vocabulary speech recogniser and to the synthesiser, both developed at CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori relecomunicazioni), Turin, Italy. Different sets of rules are designed for the two applications. Symbols inventories also differ, although the IPA alphabet is the reference system for both. Rules have been written in ANSI C and implemented on DOS and Windows 95 and can be selectively applied. Two speech corpora have been transcribed by means of these grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules: a) the SpeechDat Spanish corpus which includes 4444 words extracted from the phonetically balanced sentences of the database b) a corpus designed to train an automatic aligner to segment units for synthesis, composed of 303 sentences (3240 words) and 338 isolated words; rule-based transcriptions of this corpus were manually corrected. The phonetic forms obtained by the rules matched satisfactorily the reference transcriptions: most mistakes on the first corpus were caused by the presence of secondary stresses in the SpeechDat transcriptions, which were not assigned by the rules, whereas errors on the synthesis corpus appeared mostly on hiatuses and on words of foreign origin. Further developments oriented to recognition can imply addition of rules to account for Latin American pronunciations (especially Mexican, Argentinian and Paraguayan); for synthesis, on the other hand, rules to represent coarticulatory phenomena at word boundaries can be implemented, in order to transcribe whole sentences.

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