A Manually Annotated Resource for the Investigation of Nasal Grunts

This paper presents an annotation framework for nasal grunts of the whole French CID corpus (Bertrand et al., 2008). The acoustic components under scrutiny are justified and the annotation guidelines are described. We carefully characterise the acoustic cues and visual cues followed by the annotator, especially for non-modal phonation types. The conventions followed for the annotation of interactional and positional properties of grunts are explained. The resulting datasets after data extraction with Praat scripts (Boersma and Weenink, 2019) are analysed with R (R Core Team, 2017), focusing on duration. We analyse the effect of non-modal phonation (especially ingressive phonation) on duration and discuss a specialisation of grunts observed in the CID for grunts with ingressive phonation. The more general aim of this research is to establish putative core and additive properties of grunts and a tentative typology of grunts in spoken interactions.