How strong is an accent? Dr. Caitlin Laura Richter talks about a proposed method to quantify the amount of phonetic difference across speakers, such as individuals with different dialects or second language learners.
Time: Monday 29/11/21, from 12:20-13:00
Location: Zoom
Dr. Richter will review the development of aggregate pronunciation difference measurements within the field of linguistics, and then discuss how recent advances in deep learning facilitate a transcription-free measurement of acoustic pronunciation difference. The results can predict people’s perception of accent strength more accurately than any previous methods, and are informative about how to best take advantage of pretrained speech representations for a new task.
Dr. Richter is a postdoc at LVL and earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. She develops computational techniques for working with speech and text, particularly in lower-resource language varieties, and also studies the relationships between language variation, children’s acquisition, and historical change.
Language and Voice Lab 
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