Spoken Corpora and Analysis of Natural Speech

口語語料庫與自然語音分析

本文介紹中央研究院語言學研究所所收集的口語語料庫，並且討論如何使用這些語料於研究不同的語言學議題。除了語言學研究，我們處理的口語語料庫也具有語言典藏的價值。在研究議題上，分為兩個主軸：1) 語言變體與變化與2)口語言談特性。語音弱化是語言演變的重要因素之一，因此考慮自然語音在不同語言學層次的變體也相對必要。在這部分，我們分析了音節縮讀，元音弱化與趨向補語的語音弱化等幾個現象。在言談分析層面，我們量化了言談詞語所搭配的不同語調形式。利用聲韻單位，我們也進行了聲韻與不流暢語流在自然語音的表現與母語─非母語者如何辨識的實驗。這些議題其實是相互纏繞的。本文除了介紹口語語料庫在研究方法上的價值，也希望點出聲韻的表現是不同層次相互連結的重要指標。

This paper introduces spoken corpora of Taiwan Mandarin created at Academia Sinica and gives an overview of some recent studies carried out utilizing the spoken data. Spoken language resources of Taiwan Mandarin have been collected and processed at Academia Sinica since 2001. As a result, spoken data, which are useful not only for language archives purpose, but also for linguistic studies, has been made available. In addition to creation of the corpus, two lines of research are discussed in which theoretical and empirical studies are connected by using the aforementioned language resources: 1) language variation and change and 2) spoken discourse analysis. Phonetic reduction is one of the main reasons for changes within a language and it is important to take into account different levels of variations in spontaneous speech. For this purpose, we studied syllable contraction/merger, vowel reduction, and phonetic reduction in directional complements. Discourse items also play an essential part, because they add specific implications to sentences and their use is mainly marked by prosodic means. We segmented a spoken discourse into smaller prosodic units to allow for a more precise study of discourse items, prosodic features, and disfluency. These issues are correlated with each other, especially through prosodic markings.