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Introduction
I am a full professor in the Department of Spanish Philology at the UAB. My expertise is in experimental phonetics and intonational phonology of Spanish. My research takes a laboratory-based approach, focusing on phonetic-phonological processes and variation. I analyze prosody within intonational phonology from acoustic and perceptual perspectives, often using corpus-based analysis. I have extensive teaching experience in Spanish phonetics and phonology at both undergraduate and graduate levels.
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Additional affiliations
September 1995 - January 2024
Education
September 1989 - May 1994
Publications
Publications (71)
Oral productions of speakers with Down syndrome exhibit special characteristics that have been the target of study for decades. In spite of this attention, the availability of rich resources for its analysis is still scarce. In this paper, we present the definition and compiling procedure of a corpus of semi-controlled oral productions of speakers...
The aim of this study is to define the concept of "prosodic well-formedness" by identifying the main difficulties
of categorization of prosodic mistakes in an automatic CAPT (Computer Assisted Pronunciation Training)
system, with the goal of improving the teaching and learning of L2 intonation. The data include the results of a
manual revision by t...
The study examines the phonetic modelling of declination, a measure that relates the F0 contour with the temporal properties, in a corpus of speech of young adults with Down Syndrome (DS) in order to provide reasonable interpretations of the subjective evaluation of monotonous speech that is usually attributed to this group. The acoustic analysis o...
With the growth in popularity of video games in our society many teachers have worked to incorporate gaming into their classroom. It is generally agreed that by adding something fun to the learning process students become more engaged and, consequently, retain more knowledge. However, although the characteristics of video games facilitate the dynam...
Prosody is a fundamental speech element responsible for communicative functions such as intonation, accent and phrasing, and prosodic impairments of individuals with intellectual disabilities reduce their communication skills. Yet, technological resources have paid little attention to prosody. This study aims to develop an automatic classifier to p...
El artículo presenta el marco conceptual en que se ha desarrollado un recurso educativo en formato de videojuego con el propósito de contribuir a la mejora de la enseñanza de los límites entre la gramática y pragmática en la oralidad.
El objetivo principal de este escrito es analizar el potencial de los videojuegos educativos tipo aventura gráfica en el campo de la enseñanza de Español como Lengua Extranjera, y en particular, explorar las posibilidades de adaptación de un videojuego existente, desarrollado para la mejora de las habilidades prosódicas de alumnos con necesidades e...
The automatic translation of rules or legal text from natural language into formal language has gained interest in the natural language processing domain, especially in the field of law and AI. Our research goal is to be able to automatically extract, from rules in natural language, the necessary elements that define these rules, such as the action...
The article focuses on the evaluation procedure that accompanies the educational video game Pradia: mystery in the city. The video game is designed as an educational support tool that aims to improve the prosodic and communication skills of people with Down Syndrome, but to be effective it must be accompanied by a method of data export and evaluati...
The present study examines the patterns in stress, phrasing and intonation found in a Spanish corpus of news read by broadcasters to describe the prosodic strategies that can be considered as genre-distinguishing features. Results indicate that, firstly, the main stress modifications concern the upgrading of unstressed syllables to accented ones, t...
This study is an analysis of vowel sequences in Peninsular Spanish in a corpus of read and spontaneous speech, with respect to the three processes across word boundaries: hiatus maintanance, diphthong formation (synalepha, syllabic contraction) and deletion.
Based on the comparison with F1 / F2 data of the vowels in the syllabic nucleus position t...
This article describes the design, implementation and evaluation of an educational video game that helps individuals with Down syndrome to improve their speech skills, specifically those related to prosody. Special attention has been paid to the design of the user interface, taking into account the cognitive, learning and attentional limitations of...
The study deals with the main acoustic clues that differentiate between phonetic realizations of / b d g / in contexts of lenition in spontaneous speech. Time and intensity data of the approximant consonants gathered from the spontaneous subcorpus of the Glissando corpus allow to establish a non-discrete category within an allophonic continuum: the...
The Magic Stone " 1 is a video game whose main aim is to help people with Down syndrome to improve communication skills that have been affected due to their disability, especially those related with prosody. The interface of the video game includes a number of elements to motivate the users to practice and train their pronunciation. The usability t...
Literature review on prosody reveals the lack of corpora for prosodic studies in Catalan and Spanish. The Glissando corpus is a prosodic corpus for Spanish and Catalan which intends to fill this gap showing the capabilities of extensive speech corpora for the empirical study of prosody. With the aid of this corpus, it is possible to analyze differe...
One of the goals of the Glissando research project1 is to enrich a radio news corpus [1] with Sp ToBI labels. In this paper we present the application of the automatic predictions of a fuzzy classifier to speed up the labeling process. The strategy is proposed after completing the following steps: a) manual annotation of a part of the Glissando cor...
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...
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...
A set of tools to analyze inconsistencies observed in a Cat_ToBI labeling experiment are presented. We formalize and use the metrics that are commonly used in inconsistency tests. The metrics are systematically applied to analyze the robustness of every symbol and every pair of transcribers. The results reveal agreement rates for this study that ar...
This work contributes with an overview of the phonological and phonetic processes in Spanish: the former are those phenomena that occur systematically in any word or sequence of words in the language and are assumed by the entire linguistic community; the latter are only regular in certain speech situations, affect a restricted number of words or a...
In this paper we present an experimental study on how corpus-based automatic prosodic information labeling can be transferred from a source language to a different target language. The Spanish ESMA corpus is used to train models for the identification of the prominent words. Then, the models are used to identify the accented words of the English Bo...
This paper presents an experimental study on how corpus-based automatic prosodic information labeling can be transferred from a source language to a different target language. Tone accent identification models trained for Spanish, using the ESMA corpus, are used to automatically assign tonal accent ToBI labels on the (English) Boston Radio news cor...
This paper reports on the results of a pilot study that was run to assess the labeling consistency of the proposed approach in Sp-ToBI before starting a large-scale production of annotations in the project Glissando. This test should serve to refine the model and to maintain consistently the annotation conventions across transcription sites. The Sp...
Large prosodically labeled corpora are needed to make real progress in understanding the prosodic mechanisms that dominate the spoken communication between humans.
ToBI is a framework to develop community-wide conventions to transcribe the intonation and prosodic structure of spoken utterances in a language variety. This fine-grained labeling syste...
The paper presents the advances in the annotation of the Glissando corpus and discusses results concerning to two areas: a) the consistency and reliability of the inventory of tonal accents in Spanish when applied to large sets of data. The paper reports on the results of a pilot study that was run to assess the labeling consistency of the proposed...
Previous accounts of prosodic phrasing patterns in Catalan (Frota et al., 2007) have shown various cues that are indicative of phrase boundaries.This paper reports on the distributional analysis of the boundary types in the Festcat corpus. The most relevant results are the following: (1) Strategies of phrasing are equivalent in the two voices (male...
L�article presenta el primer sistema complet d�etiquetatge prosòdic per al català basat en el model mètric autosegmental: el Catalan ToBI o Cat_ToBI. La proposta es basa en resultats d�estudis anteriors i en una anàlisi qualitativa d�un corpus de diferents dialectes del català. Les unitats fonològiques que formen el sistema són les següents. Pel qu...
This paper presents our work around the FESTCAT project, whose main goal was the development of voices for the Festival suite in Catalan. In the first year, we produced the corpus and the speech data needed for build 10 voices using the Clunits (unit selection) and the HTS (Markov models) methods. The resulting voices are freely available on the we...
Resumen de la tesis doctoral dirigida por la dra. Dolors Poch y presentada el día 25 de mayo de 1994 ante el tribunal constituido por: Dr. Joan Argente Giralt, Dr. Bernard Harmegnies, Dr. Josep Martí i Roca, Dra. Emilia Enríquez Carrasco, Dra. Lourdes Oñederra Olaizola.
Este trabajo se inscribe en el marco del proyecto general AMPER, Atlas Multimedia de Prosodia del Espacio Románico, (Contini 2005; Fernández Planas 2005) y, en particular, en AMPERCAT que aplica la idea y la metodología AMPER al estudio de las principales variedades del catalán. Published in
El objetivo de este trabajo es ofrecer nuevos datos sob...
Diversos estudios sobre la distinción ente hiato y diptongo han demostrado que el tratamiento léxico de este fenómeno es la mejor vía de explicación en el dominio de la palabra. En el estudio presente nos planteamos qué sucede en el enlace de palabras, meidante el diseño de un experimento con el doble objetivo de determinar los indicios acústicos q...
Reseña: Marcial Prado (2001): Diccionario de falsos amigos. Inglés-español, Madrid, Gredos.
RESUMEN. En el presente artículo describimos una herramienta informática de desambiguación morfológica para el español, diseñada para ser integrada en un siste-ma de corrección gramatical avanzada para el castellano y el catalán basado en la com-binación de dos tipos de herramientas, a saber: a) Un analizador morfosintáctico de bajo nivel y b) Un a...
This paper reports an acoustic study in which Spanish speaker's productions of the vowel /a/ in contact with /a e i/ in word boundaries were obtained during the reading of texts. All tokens were measured for vowel quality (F1/F2) and duration. The obtained data allowed us to classify the observed phonetic results according to phonological processes...
The purpose of this work is to describe the appearance and location of typographically unmarked pauses in any Spanish text to be read. An experiment is designed to derive pause location from natural speech: results show that Intonation Group length constraints guide the appearance of pauses, which are placed depending on syntactic information. Then...
Un sistema de conversión de texto a habla requiere el diseño y la conexión de módulos de procesamiento lingüístico y de tratamiento de señal. En aquellos sistemas basados en la concatenación de segmentos de voz, la calidad de la voz resultante depende en buena medida del diseño del diccionario de unidades acústicas que se han grabado y almacenado....
The aim of this study is to determine the acoustic properties of hiatuses (vowel-vowel sequences) and diphthongs (glide-vowel sequences) in Spanish and to observe how these properties are modified depending on communicative factors. To do this, two groups of data were used: speech samples gathered from conversations between two speakers participati...
Applications in natural language processing and speech technologies such as text-to-speech or recognition systems require text analysis procedures that are able to run in real time with a low computational cost, and that are robust enough to deal with unrestricted input text. Attempts to automatize the processes of obtaining and analyzing data are...
Este trabajo presenta un conjunto de pruebas para evaluar la inteligibilidad, la comprensión y la calidad global del habla generada por sistemas de conversión de texto a habla en español, aplicado específicamente al sistema desarrollado por Telefónica I+D. Las pruebas, diseñadas en el Departament de Filologia Espanyola de la Universitat Autònoma de...
This paper describes the conventions proposed in the first prosodic transcription system within the Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) framework for Catalan: CatalanToBI or Cat_ToBI. The proposal is based on the previous literature on Catalan intonation and a qualitative analysis of a corpus of spoken Catalan that covers several dialects. In the tone t...
In this paper we present an experience to measure the inter-transcribers consisteny where a number of observer have been required to identify ToBI events in the same set of sentences. We computed the pairwise transcribers agreement with its cor-responding confusion matrix and the kappa coefficients. The goal was to identify the main sources of conf...
The present study focus on the influence of intentionality of the speech act in the characterisation of speaking styles. Two procedures to elicitate spontaneous speech in a laboratory environment are presented: the map task and a semidirected interview, both performed with the same speaker. Differences in elicitation procedures are interpreted in b...
Resumen El objetivo del artículo es identificar las propiedades prosódicas más relevantes de cara a la identificación del acento de prominencia en un contexto multilingüe usando un clasificador de tipo red neuronal y un árbol de decisión. El enfoque multilingüe consiste en utilizar datos que proceden del análisis de corpus de hablada en inglés para...
This article reports the process of building a bilingual (Spanish-Catalan) text corpus balanced in parallel taking into account prosodic features for both languages. We propose an expert guideline for text manipulation that in combination with greedy algorithms significantly improves the quality of the selected corpus. The application of this metho...
This article reports the process of building a balanced text corpus taking
into account prosodic features. We formalize the application of greedy algorithms for text selection and we discuss their limitations. We also defend an expert guideline for text manipulation that significantly improves the performance of the algorithms.
The application of t...
