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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wallbridge, Sarenne, Minixhofer, Christoph, Lai, Catherine, Bell, Peter
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02584
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author Wallbridge, Sarenne
Minixhofer, Christoph
Lai, Catherine
Bell, Peter
author_facet Wallbridge, Sarenne
Minixhofer, Christoph
Lai, Catherine
Bell, Peter
contents People exploit the predictability of lexical structures during text comprehension. Though predictable structure is also present in speech, the degree to which prosody, e.g. intonation, tempo, and loudness, contributes to such structure independently of the lexical content is unclear. This study leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) to examine the temporal granularity of structures in the acoustic correlates of prosody. Representations from our proposed Masked Prosody Model can predict perceptual labels dependent on local information, such as word boundaries, but provide the most value for labels involving longer-term structures, like emotion recognition. Probing experiments across various perceptual labels show strong relative gains over untransformed pitch, energy, and voice activity features. Our results reveal the importance of SSL training objective timescale and highlight the value of complex SSL-encoded structures compared to more constrained classical structures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02584
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prosodic Structure Beyond Lexical Content: A Study of Self-Supervised Learning
Wallbridge, Sarenne
Minixhofer, Christoph
Lai, Catherine
Bell, Peter
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
People exploit the predictability of lexical structures during text comprehension. Though predictable structure is also present in speech, the degree to which prosody, e.g. intonation, tempo, and loudness, contributes to such structure independently of the lexical content is unclear. This study leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) to examine the temporal granularity of structures in the acoustic correlates of prosody. Representations from our proposed Masked Prosody Model can predict perceptual labels dependent on local information, such as word boundaries, but provide the most value for labels involving longer-term structures, like emotion recognition. Probing experiments across various perceptual labels show strong relative gains over untransformed pitch, energy, and voice activity features. Our results reveal the importance of SSL training objective timescale and highlight the value of complex SSL-encoded structures compared to more constrained classical structures.
title Prosodic Structure Beyond Lexical Content: A Study of Self-Supervised Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02584