Russian Phonetic Variability and Connected Speech Transcription

Abstract

The study of pronunciation variability is an important phonetic task, which has many applications (in speech synthesis and recognition systems, language teaching, forensic phonetics, etc.), and well-known variability of Russian speech deserves special investigations. Generally, one may distinguish geographical, functional, social and national variability of pronunciation. At the same time any type of pronunciation is characterised by its own internal variability. It concerns as well the standard speech. Database of contemporary Russian speech variability is currently being created in the Laboratory of the Experimental Phonetics of St. Petersburg University in order to investigate pronunciation variance of different speech types. The database of sound material is formed by recordings of the Phonetically Representative Texts pronounced by 1) standard Russian speakers, 2) regional Russian speakers, 3) speakers from the former USSR republics to which Russian is a second language, and 4) foreigners from European, Asian and American countries. Along with the sound database, an expert linguistic system is being created, which allows analysis and investigation of particular speech samples, types and corresponding parameters. An important role here plays the system of speech transcription, which should adequately reflect the actual variability.