AlignTool: The automatic temporal alignment of spoken utterances in German, Dutch, and British English for psycholinguistic purposes
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Publication year
2018Number of pages
24 p.
Source
Behavior Research Methods, 50, 2, (2018), pp. 466-489ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor
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Organization
SW OZ DCC PL
Journal title
Behavior Research Methods
Volume
vol. 50
Issue
iss. 2
Languages used
English (eng)
Page start
p. 466
Page end
p. 489
Subject
DI-BCB_DCC_Theme 1: Language and Communication; PsycholinguisticsAbstract
In language production research, the latency with which speakers produce a spoken response to a stimulus and the onset and offset times of words in longer utterances are key dependent variables. Measuring these variables automatically often yields partially incorrect results. However, exact measurements through the visual inspection of the recordings are extremely time-consuming. We present AlignTool, an open-source alignment tool that establishes preliminarily the onset and offset times of words and phonemes in spoken utterances using Praat, and subsequently performs a forced alignment of the spoken utterances and their orthographic transcriptions in the automatic speech recognition system MAUS. AlignTool creates a Praat TextGrid file for inspection and manual correction by the user, if necessary. We evaluated AlignTool's performance with recordings of single-word and four-word utterances as well as semi-spontaneous speech. AlignTool performs well with audio signals with an excellent signal-to-noise ratio, requiring virtually no corrections. For audio signals of lesser quality, AlignTool still is highly functional but its results may require more frequent manual corrections. We also found that audio recordings including long silent intervals tended to pose greater difficulties for AlignTool than recordings filled with speech, which AlignTool analyzed well overall. We expect that by semi-automatizing the temporal analysis of complex utterances, AlignTool will open new avenues in language production research.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [238586]
- Electronic publications [122804]
- Faculty of Social Sciences [29513]
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