LING 7800-005: LSA Summer Institute 20112
Homework 2: Background in Prosody/Acoustics

Due in 2 parts:

• Part I due before class on July 12
• Part II will be a lab assignment to be given out and started done in class, with your results emailed to us together with Part III.

Part I: Praat practice (due before class on Tue July 12),

• Download Praat onto a laptop that you can bring to class. (If that's not possible, use another computer, and you will have to share a laptop with someone on Tuesday).
• Read the very brief tutorial here, and look at the homepage: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/
Additional PRAAT resources:
1. » http://www.helsinki. fi/~lennes/praat-scripts/
2. » http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/praat-users/
3. » http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/acoustic/praat.html
• Record yourself in Praat saying the following two sentences:
  • "That chapter is definitely too long"
  • "That cockroach is totally disgusting!"
• For each of the two sentences, mail me (before class) the following 6 pieces of information:
  1. The average pitch of the whole sentence in Hz
  2. The maximum pitch for the whole utterance in Hz
  3. The minimum pitch for the whole utterance in Hz
  4. The maximum intensity for the whole utterance in Hz
  5. The minimum intensity for the whole utterance in Hz
  6. Your rate of speech in words per second for the utterance.
• Write one more sentence based on these numbers describing the intonational/prosodic difference betweeen the two sentences and saying something about the cause.

Part II: Smiling speech (to be done as a lab in class on Tue July 12 with the writeup handed in together with Part III)

• Bring your laptop to class with Praat installed
• Get a partner; you can use both your laptops or share one.
• Smiling speech:
  1. Record yourself saying the sentence This sentence might be a smiling sentence in two ways: smiling and not smiling. Try for a genuine smile; use your partner to make sure you get a good example.
  2. Compare the two sentences on F0, F1, and energy. Discuss any patterns you see.
  3. Read this paper:
     • Julie Robson and Janet MackenzieBeck. 1999. Hearing smiles - perceptual, acoustic and production aspects of labial spreading, ICPhS-99, San Francisco, 219-222.
  4. Write up one pgraph with your numbers and the discussion. Make sure in your writeup you compare to the Robson paper.

Part III: Sarcasm

1. Read this paper:
   • Tepperman, Joseph, David Traum, and Shrikanth Narayanan. 2006. Yeah right: Sarcasm recognition for spoken dialogue systems. ICSLP 2006.
2. Record yourself saying the sentence Yeah, right! in two ways: sarcastic and not sarcastic. Try for genuine sarcasm; use your partner to make sure you get a good example and the two utterances are distinct.
3. Compare the two sentences on prosodic features (pitch, energy, duration). Discuss any patterns you see.
4. Write up one pgraph with your numbers and the discussion. In your writeup, make sure you compare to the Tepperman et al. paper