Common and Language Dependent Phonetic Differences Between Read and Spontaneous Speech in Russian, Finnish and Dutch

This preliminary study aims to reveal both common and language-specific phonetic differences between read and spontaneous speech in three typologically unrelated languages – Russian, Finnish, and Dutch. These languages differ in prosody, sound systems, speech styles, and means for conveying intonational meaning. Spontaneous speech was recorded from 5 to 8 speakers in each language. Transliterated extracts from the spontaneous speech recordings were read aloud by the same speakers. For Dutch, comparable speech material from the labeled IFA corpus and the transcribed Spoken Dutch Corpus was used. The two types of speech in the three languages were studied comparing their F0 statistics, segment durations, and the number of some consonant elisions.