How the Word Order in Russian Colloquial Speech Hinders a Person to Visually Perceive the Speech

Abstract

This article continues our work, where we describe possible barriers for a person to visually perceive verbal speech by observing the speaker's articulation. The quality of articulations determines the result of this process. We investigate the varieties of Russian speech and describe their distinctive features. We determined typological features of the speech activity units. We take into account the units’ structure and forms of perception. We present a study of how oral colloquial speech is formed and perceived. Furthermore, we focus on the peculiarities of colloquial spontaneous speech, as the main and more common form of speech. Spontaneous speech is unprepared and constantly changes as communicative conditions change. From a communicative point of view, we investigate how relevant it is to divide the speech flow in spontaneous speech into separate components. Speakers demarcate words by means of pauses between the words and pronounce the words more clearly. Our attention is focused on flexible word order in oral colloquial speech. The components of an utterance occupy certain positions in it; the positions depend on the specific meaning intended by the speaker. We investigate distinct features of how oral colloquial speech is visually and phonetically recognized as the order of the speech components changes. Such order of the speech components is used by the speaker unintentionally or intentionally to achieve a specific goal. We present examples of how to permute utterance components by means of our developed corpus of homoviseme words. If such words are interchangeable, the quality of speech perception changes. All words with similar visemes are defined for a given utterance component without taking into account pseudowords. Our results can be used by specialists in articulatory colloquial speech and to develop speech recognition software. Linguists in many countries show interest in our research.

Keywords

• visual recognition of spoken language
• articulation approach
• colloquial spontaneous speech
• word order
• speech flow segmentation
• visemes
• homovisemes
• pseudowords