Omnia Ibrahim

Saarland University | UKS · Language Science and Technology

Predictability is known to influence acoustic duration (e.g., Ibrahim et al. 2022) and prosodic factors such as accenting and boundary-related lengthening have been postulated to account for this effect (e.g., Aylett & Turk 2004). However, it has also been shown that other factors such as information status or speech styles could contribute to acou...

The Lombard effect, a well-documented phenomenon in speech production, arises when a speaker modifies speech to be intelligible in a noisy environment (Lombard 1911). This effect often involves an increase in intensity, fundamental frequency and duration (e.g., Ibrahim et.al. 2022). The current study followed up on the production results in Ibrahim...

This paper investigated whether predictability-based adjustments in production have listener-oriented consequences in perception. By manipulating the acoustic features of a target syllable in different predictability contexts in German, we tested 40 listeners' perceptual preference for the manipulation. Four source words underwent acoustic modifica...

Pause occurrence is conditional on contextual (un)predictability (in terms of surprisal) [10, 11], and so is the acoustic implementation of duration at multiple linguistic levels. Although these cues (i.e., pause usage/pause duration and syllable duration) are subject to the influence of the same factor, it is not clear how they are related to one...

Contextual predictability has pervasive effects on the acoustic realization of speech. Generally, duration is shortened in more predictable contexts and conversely lengthened in less predictable contexts. There are several measures to quantify predictability in a message. One of them is surprisal, which is calculated as S(Uniti) = -log2 P (Uniti|Co...

Speech is a highly dynamic process. Some variability is inherited directly from the language itself, while other variability stems from adapting to the surrounding en- vironment or interlocutor. This Ph.D. thesis consists of seven studies investigating speech adaptation concerning the message, channel, and listener variability. It starts with inves...

The present study explores the extent to which vocal accommodation in conflicting situations can be explained by socio-pragmatic factors such as interpersonal relationships (i.e., politeness) and pragmatic events occurring in apology-centered interactions. A total of 28 dyadic conversations where 14 target speakers (8 males and 6 females) interacte...

Speakers tend to speak clearly in noisy environments, while they tend to reserve effort by shortening word duration in predictable contexts. It is unclear how these two communicative demands are met. The current study investigates the acoustic realizations of syllables in predictable vs unpredictable contexts across different background noise level...

Speakers modulate the characteristics of their own speech and produce a listener- oriented, clear speaking style in response to communication demands (Bradlow, 2002; Lindblom, 1990). Such clear speech often takes the form of increased loudness, higher pitch, expanded vowel space, hyper-articulation, and lengthening, with perceptual consequences of...

Cross-linguistic evidence suggests that syllables in predictable contexts have shorter duration than in unpredictable contexts. However, it is not clear if predictability uniformly affects phonetic cues of a phonological feature in a segment. The current study investigated the effect of predictability on the durational correlates of the phonologica...

In today'sV oice-over-IP (VoIP) telephony, packet loss is one of the most prominent degradations. Severely bursty packet loss can lead to multiple consecutive packets and thus important parts of the transmitted speech to be lost. In listening-only tests, the understandabilityo fp acket loss-affected speech can be modeled based on the available audi...

Aiming to enhance speech intelligibility, speakers increase voice loudness and fundamental frequency in the presence of background noise [1,2]. This is commonly known as 'Lombard speech' and assumed to enhance the effectiveness of communication: speaking in a noisy environment results in a more intelligible speech signal as compared to speaking in...

In this paper, we investigate the differences between human-directed speech and robot-directed speech during spontaneous human-human-robot interactions. The interactions under study are different from previous studies, in the sense that the robot has a more similar role as the human interlocutors, which leads to more spontaneous turn-taking. 20 con...

Speakers modulate the characteristics of their own speech and produce a listener-oriented, clear speaking style in response to communication demands [1,2]. Such clear speech often takes the form of increased loudness, higher pitch, expanded vowel space, hyper-articulation, and lengthening, with perceptual consequences of improved intelligibility. O...

When communicating, speakers constantly position themselves in relation to the ongoing social interaction. Depending on whether a person interacts with a senior or a peer, the socio-pragmatic level of their speech is adapted in one way or another. This adaptation may lead to an increase or a decrease in the interlocutors' speech similarity. Such a...

In everyday communication, the goal of speakers is to communicate their messages in an intelligible manner to their listeners. When they are aware of a speech perception difficulty on the part of the listener due to background noise, a hearing impairment, or a different native language, speakers will naturally and spontaneously modify their speech...

Speakers adapt their speech to increase clarity in the presence of background noise (Lombard speech) [1, 2]. However, they also modify their speech to be efficient by shortening word duration in more predictable contexts [3]. To meet these two communicative functions, speakers will attempt to resolve any conflicting communicative demands. The prese...

Accommodation - the process by which interlocutors mutually change their speech patterns either by becoming more similar (convergence) or dissimilar (divergence) - is a pervasive phenomenon in speech communication (Giles et.al, 1991). Factors of very diverse nature have shown to affect accommodation. For instance, less convergence has been document...

Databases for studying speech rhythm and tempo exist for numerous languages. The present corpus was built to allow comparisons between Arabic speech rhythm and other languages. 10 Egyptian speakers (gender-balanced) produced speech in two different speaking styles (read and spontaneous). The design of the reading task replicates the methodology use...

In this paper, we present an extension of a novel continuous residual-based vocoder for statistical parametric speech synthesis by addressing two objectives. First, because the noise component is often not accurately modelled in modern vocoders (e.g. STRAIGHT), a new technique for modelling unvoiced sounds is proposed by adding time domain envelope...

In human-human interactions, the situational context plays a large role in the degree of speakers’ accommodation. In this paper, we investigate whether the degree of accommodation in a human-robot computer game is affected by (a) the duration of the interaction and (b) the success of the players in the game. 30 teams of two players played two card...

In everyday interactions, speakers tend to accommodate to the speech of their conversation partners. There are many studies that measure the acoustic and phonetic prosperities of accommodation phenomena in different adult communication situations (e.g. interactions between speakers from different dialects or languages). However, few studies have ex...

The present research aims to build an MSA audio-visual corpus. The corpus is annotated both phonetically and visually and dedicated to emotional speech processing studies. The building of the corpus consists of 5 main stages: speaker selection, sentences selection, recording, annotation and evaluation. 500 sentences were critically selected based o...