Browsing by Subject "puheentuotto"

Goals: The aim of this study was to examine the speech production of Finnish compound words. Finnish prosody and the effect of contrastive focus has been studied widely, but there is no research about the prosody of compound production. This study compared the differences in prosodic features of compound words and phrases and examined the effect of sentence stress to the production of compound words. Methods and materials: This quantitative research consisted of a speech production test and statistical analysis. In the speech production test, sentences with the compound words and phrases made of the same words (e.g. kissankello 'harebell' and kissan kello 'cat's bell') were repeated in three focus conditions. These were broad focus, narrow focus on the first word and narrow focus on the second word. 20 subjects (14 female, 6 male) read 1200 sentences in total, which were segmented and annotated. Fundamental frequency, intensity and syllable lengths were measured and compared between compound words and phrases. The relationships between the word types and acoustic features were studied using repeated measures analysis of variance. Results and conclusions: This research revealed new information about the production of compound words in different focus conditions. Results showed that in the broad focus condition compound words and phrases were produced differently from each other. Word type had a statistically significant effect (p < 0,001) on the acoustical measurements: speakers treated compound words as one word with one primary stress in the first syllable while phrases were treated as two words with individual primary stresses. Contrastive focus strongly affected to the acoustic parameters, and those changes masked the word type differences that were found in the broad focus condition. Context has a significant effect on how a listener interprets the message, but there are also acoustical ways to distinguish compound words from phrases in speech. These findings give a strong foundation to future research, however there are limitations. It is important to increase the amount of male speakers in this study and the research could be expanded to different dialects of Finnish and the speech of non-native speakers. The results can also be used in the development of speech synthesis, e.g. text-to-speech synthesis.