GUBIAN, M., Torreira, F., Strik, H. & Boves, L. (2009) Functional Data Analysis as a Tool for Analyzing Speech Dynamics A Case Study on the French Word “c’était”. Proceedings of Interspeech 2009, Brighton, U.K.
In this paper we introduce Functional Data Analysis (FDA) as a tool for analyzing dynamic transitions in speech signals. FDA makes it possible to perform statistical analyses of sets of mathematical functions in the same way as classical multivariate
analysis treats scalar measurement data. We illustrate the use of FDA with a reduction phenomenon affecting the French word c’était /setE/ ‘it was’, which can be reduced to [stE] in conversational speech. FDA reveals that the dynamics of the transition from [s] to [t] in fully reduced cases may still be different from the dynamics of [s] - [t] transitions in underlying /st/ clusters such as in the word stage.
