Alžběta Houzar

Summary: This study investigates the acceptability of left dislocations (LD) and long topicalizations (LT) in Czech across different registers. While previous research has suggested a potential association between these constructions and specific language use situations, empirical studies examining distribution of LD and LT in Czech remain scarce. The objective of this study is to examine how the situational context influences the acceptability judgements of LDs and LTs. An online acceptability judgement study was conducted, involving 60 native speakers of Czech who assessed the acceptability of sentences containing LDs and LTs presented in various situational contexts. The LDs were evaluated in spontaneous, prepared, static, and dynamic situations, while the LTs were assessed in written formal and spoken informal contexts. Regression models were employed to analyze the collected data, revealing that both LDs and LTs generally had a negative impact on sentence acceptability compared to control sentences lacking these constructions. Importantly, the situational context significantly influenced the acceptability ratings, with LTs being notably less acceptable in written formal contexts and LDs showing lower acceptability in static contexts compared to the other situations. These findings underscore the influence of situational context on the acceptability of syntactic constructions in Czech, emphasizing the need for further research in this area.

Individual speakers’ voices display various unique patterns, one of the most prominent of which is vowel articulation. This study focuses on vowel space properties of 15 Czech speakers in read and spontaneous speech, comparing outputs of three formant extraction methods, measuring formants: (1) in the vowels’ temporal midpoints, (2) as their mean from the vowels’ middle thirds, and (3) in the vowels’ articulatory targets. The results show extensive variability across speakers, but also great within-speaker variability between the two speech styles, with spontaneous speech manifesting more centralised vowel pronunciation than read utterances. The first two measurement methods did not yield systematically different results, while formant values extracted from acoustically defined articulatory targets lead to noticeably larger vowel spaces. The results suggest that care should be taken when interpreting formant values obtained by different methods.

The so-called ‘mismatch’ is a factor which experts in the forensic voice comparison field encounter regularly. Therefore, we decided to explore to what extent the automatic-speaker-recognition system’s and the earwitness’ ability to identify speakers is influenced when recordings are acquired in different languages and at different times. 100 voices in a database of 300 recordings (100 speakers recorded in three mutually mismatched sessions) were compared with an automatic-speaker-recognition software VOCALISE based on i-vectors and x-vectors, and by 39 respondents in simulated voice parades. Both the automatic and perceptual approach seem to have yielded similar results in that the less complex the mismatch type, the more successful the identification. The results point to the superiority of the x-vector approach, and also to varying identification abilities of listeners.