The GEMMA speech database: VCV and VCCV words for the acoustic analysis of consonants and lexical gemination in Italian
Description
The GEMMA database consists in recordings of disyllabic words: vowel–consonant–vowel (VCV) for nongeminate cases and vowel–consonant–consonant–vowel (VCCV) for geminate cases. The consonants in the words are stops, affricates, fricatives, nasals and liquids. Six native adult speakers of Standard Italian, three female and three male, were recorded. The database also includes recordings for glides (/j/,/w/). The vowels in the words are /a, i, u/; words are symmetric with respect to vowel. The dataset also includes measurements of duration parameters for all of those consonants that can be either singletons or geminates, used in the research papers: M.-G. Di Benedetto and L. De Nardis, "Consonant gemination in Italian: The affricate and fricative case" Speech Communication, Volume 134, November 2021, pp. 86-108. DOI: 10.1016/j.specom.2021.07.005. M.-G. Di Benedetto and L. De Nardis, "Consonant gemination in Italian: The nasal and liquid case" Speech Communication, Volume 133, October 2021, pp. 62-80. DOI: 10.1016/j.specom.2021.07.006. A. Esposito and M.-G. Di Benedetto, Acoustic and perceptual study of gemination in Italian stops, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, ASA, Vol. 106, n.4, pt. 1, October 1999, pp. 2051-2026. DOI: 10.1121/1.428056,
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Steps to reproduce
Recording sessions were carried out in an Amplisilence recording booth by Amplifon, featuring internal sound absorbing panels to avoid voice reverberation, and characterized by an external noise reduction of about 30 dB at the frequencies of interest. The microphone was an omnidirectional, monophonic SONY ECM 144 Electret Condenser Microphone, with a flat frequency response up to 15 kHz and a sensitivity of -55.3 dBm/mbar, selected according to the guidelines provided in [4]. The microphone was connected to a KENWOOD KT-48L tape recorder without automatic volume adjustment, to prevent unpredictable gain variations during the recordings. The connection between microphone and tape recorder used the built-in connec-tion panel available in the recording booth, allowing thus to keep the door of the booth closedduring the recording sessions. Words were written on cards that were presented to the speaker by the operator through the glass window of the recording booth. The distance of the speaker’s lips from the microphone was monitored during the recording sessions and was kept at about 20 cm, by having the microphone hanging in front of the speaker at a height adjusted to match the height of speaker’s mouth. Six adult Italian native speakers raised and living in Rome (Italy), three men and three women aged from twenty-four to fifty, participated in the recordings. The speakers were pronunciation defectless and free of evident dialectal inflexions. Recording sessions were supervised by an acoustically trained person, in charge of pointing out evident mispronunciations and prompting a new recording when needed. Speakers were asked to maintain their natural speaking style in order to mitigate the impact of variations in emission levels and tempo.The use of multiple repetitions helped mitigating the risk of biases in the recorded material; cards were shuffled after each recording session.