Polish Rhythmic Database ― New Resources for Speech Timing and Rhythm Analysis

This paper reports on a new database ― Polish rhythmic database and tools developed with the aim of investigating timing phenomena and rhythmic structure in Polish including topics such as, inter alia, the effect of speaking style and tempo on timing patterns, phonotactic and phrasal properties of speech rhythm and stability of rhythm metrics. So far, 19 native and 12 non-native speakers with different first languages have been recorded. The collected speech data (5 h 14 min.) represents five different speaking styles and five different tempi. For the needs of speech corpus management, annotation and analysis, a database was developed and integrated with Annotation Pro (Klessa et al., 2013, Klessa, 2016). Currently, the database is the only resource for Polish which allows for a systematic study of a broad range of phenomena related to speech timing and rhythm. The paper also introduces new tools and methods developed to facilitate the database annotation and analysis with respect to various timing and rhythm measures. In the end, the results of an ongoing research and first experimental results using the new resources are reported and future work is sketched.