Introducing the SEA_AP: an Enhanced Tool for Automatic Prosodic Analysis

Abstract

SEA_AP (Segmentador e Etiquetador Automático para Análise Prosódica, Automatic Segmentation and Labelling for Prosodic Analysis) toolkit is an application that performs audio segmentation and labelling to create a TextGrid file which will be used to launch a prosodic analysis using Praat. In this paper, we want to describe the improved functionality of the tool achieved by adding a dialectometric analysis module using R scripts. The dialectometric analysis includes computing correlations among F0 curves and it obtains prosodic distances among the different variables of interest (location, speaker, structure, etc.). The dialectometric analysis requires large databases in order to be adequately computed, and automatic segmentation and labelling can create them thanks to a procedure less costly than the manual alternative. Thus, the integration of these tools into the SEA_AP allows to propose a distribution of geoprosodic areas by means of a quantitative method, which completes the traditional dialectological point of view. The current version of the SEA_AP toolkit is capable of analysing Galician, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese data, and hence the distances between several prosodic linguistic varieties can be measured at present.

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