Understanding Prosody and Tone Interactions through Documentation of Two Endangered Languages

For accurate automated translation of text-to-spoken-word or spoken-word-to-text, it is necessary to understand the prosodic patterning of speech since prosody, i.e. stress, rhythm, and pauses between phrases, is central in conveying meaning and structuring discourse. In addition, many languages use tone to change the meaning of words but little is known about how prosodic features interact with tone. Since tone and prosody are conveyed by using some of the same acoustic dimensions (pitch, duration, voice quality), one must know how these two systems interact for automatic speech recognition and translation. To investigate and test hypotheses about the relationship of tone and prosody, Christian Di Canio, along with an interdisciplinary team, will create a database of 30 hours of transcribed narratives from Itunyoso Trique and expand an existing similar database in Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, both both Mixtecan languages from eastern central Mexico. These transcribed narratives will then be parsed into smaller units applying a 'forced alignment' tool used in automatic speech recognition. Important results from the project will include the testing and improvement of the forced alignment tool; new corpora and expanded dictionaries for and Yoloxóchitl Mixtec; and an analysis of tone and prosody interactions in these two languages. The resulting prosodically segmented and tagged corpora will be a first of its kind for an endangered language that will be of use to the speaker-community and the broader scientific community. This project is partially supported by funds from the Robust Intelligence program.