This master thesis provides a relatively detailed description of the consonant-vowel structure of standard spoken Czech. The first part covers approaches to and findings on the combinatorial system and distribution of sound units in speech; aspects of continuous speech segmentation into intonation phrases and stress groups, phonotactics of languages in general and Czech in particular, and speech rhythm are also addressed. Recordings of 12 professional speakers of Czech - comprising 6639 words and 5368 stress groups in total - have been used to create data sets that have enabled the author to describe CVCV structures of Czech words and stress groups. The results of this research present frequencies of words and stress groups and their relations to word-class dimension, frequencies of phones in words and stress groups; in this respect, both syllabic liquids and glottal stops have been taken into account. Further, the thesis includes an overview of the most frequent CVCV patterns in words and stress groups and their variability with regard to word classes. The final part focuses on how frequently consonants, vowels and their pairs and trios occur at different places within a unit. The results are continuously compared both between themselves and with the research that used the larger SYN2005 written...

The present thesis deals with rhythmic differences between Welsh English and the British Standard. It focuses on the varieties spoken in Cardiff and Aberystwyth in particular. The first part of the theoretical chapter summarises the approaches towards rhythm from the physiological, acoustic, perceptual, and phonological perspectives. The second part provides a basic description of the British Standard, Welsh, and Welsh English. It concerns itself with the existing information related to the subject matter especially as regards Welsh varieties of English. The last, third part, serves as an overview of the most common approaches towards the search of the acoustic correlates of rhythm (%V, ∆C, ∆V, PVI, varco, RR, YARD). The following chapters of the thesis present a material based study of the data obtained for the purposes of the thesis. The segmentation was carried out according to the principles proposed by Machač and Skarnitzl 2009. Rhythm was measured for four respondents for each selected location of Wales. The age span was 35-39 years for the group from Cardiff and 29-39 for that from Aberystwyth. The values measured were compared with the research of Volín and Pollák from 2009, which, among other things, provided the results of the rhythmic values for %V and ∆C for the British Standard on the...

The main objective of this thesis is to explore the relationships between the phonotactic structure of the Czech stress-group and the rhythm of speech. Three most frequent consonantal-vocalic structures of Czech two-syllable stress-groups were selected for the purposes of this thesis: CVCV, CVCCV and CVCCV. In an auditory experiment, which contained the comparison of two stress-groups or the comparison of a stress-group and a low-frequency shadow of a stress-group, the respondents established how similar the rhythm of each couple of stress-groups sounded. The results indicate that the position of a consonantal cluster within the stress-group is the strongest phonotactic factor in perception of the rhythmic similarity. The number of consonants within a consonantal cluster and the presence of a long vowel in both stress- groups were considered weaker factors for perceiving the rhythmic similarity by the respondents. Possibilities for a follow-up research were proposed for the factors that did not reach statistical significance, i.e., the difference in sonority or voicing of consonants. Keywords: speech rhythm, stress-group, phonotactics, consonantal-vocalic structure, Czech

This thesis deals with syllable boundaries in Czech and the issue of their determination. The theoretical part discusses the concept of the syllable in terms of both phonetics and phonology, introduces several approaches to syllabification (i.e. division of words into syllables) along with factors that are relevant in syllabification, and it also presents a survey of methods used in syllable boundary investigation. The following chapters describe a series of experiments that are to be a basis for formulating a syllabification model of Czech. The first group of experiments examines the phonetic correlates of syllable affiliation of intervocalic consonants (using electropalatography and temporal parameters). A phonotactic analysis of a spoken and a written corpus follows, in which we computed type and token frequencies of occurrence of word-initial and word-final clusters. The subsequent chapter introduces three behavioural experiments, in which the participants work with words and syllables without explicitly focusing on syllable boundaries (synchronization of syllables with a metronome pulse; syllable permutation; inserting silence into words). The first two experiments examined what phonetic and phonological factors are relevant in the syllabification of Czech words. The aim of the third...

Práce pojednává o fonotaktickém a akustickém přístupu pro automatické rozpoznávání jazyka. První část práce pojednává o fonotaktickém přístupu založeném na výskytu fonémových sekvenci v řeči. Nejdříve je prezentován popis vývoje fonémového rozpoznávače jako techniky pro přepis řeči do sekvence smysluplných symbolů. Hlavní důraz je kladen na dobré natrénování fonémového rozpoznávače a kombinaci výsledků z několika fonémových rozpoznávačů trénovaných na různých jazycích (Paralelní fonémové rozpoznávání následované jazykovými modely (PPRLM)). Práce také pojednává o nové technice anti-modely v PPRLM a studuje použití fonémových grafů místo nejlepšího přepisu. Na závěr práce jsou porovnány dva přístupy modelování výstupu fonémového rozpoznávače -- standardní n-gramové jazykové modely a binární rozhodovací stromy. Hlavní přínos v akustickém přístupu je diskriminativní modelování cílových modelů jazyků a první experimenty s kombinací diskriminativního trénování a na příznacích, kde byl odstraněn vliv kanálu. Práce dále zkoumá různé druhy technik fúzi akustického a fonotaktického přístupu. Všechny experimenty jsou provedeny na standardních datech z NIST evaluaci konané v letech 2003, 2005 a 2007, takže jsou přímo porovnatelné s výsledky ostatních skupin zabývajících se automatickým rozpoznáváním jazyka. S fúzí uvedených technik jsme posunuli state-of-the-art výsledky a dosáhli vynikajících výsledků ve dvou NIST evaluacích.