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SUMMARY:A Spatial Modeling Approach for Linguistic Object Data: Analysing 
 dialect sound variations across Great-Britain - Shahin Tavakoli
DTSTART:20170518T121000Z
DTEND:20170518T130000Z
UID:TALK72629@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:KC Sivaramakrishnan
DESCRIPTION:Dialect sound variation is of considerable interest in linguis
 tics and other social sciences. However\, traditionally it has been studie
 d using proxies (transcriptions) rather than acoustic recordings directly.
  We introduce novel statistical techniques to analyse geolocalised speech 
 recordings and to explore the spatial variation of pronunciations continuo
 usly over the region of interest\, as opposed to traditional isoglosses\, 
 which provide a discrete partition of the region. Data of this type requir
 e an explicit modeling of the variation in the mean and the covariance. We
  then propose spatial smoothing for these objects which accounts for the p
 ossibly non convex geometry of the domain of interest. We apply the propos
 ed method to data from the spoken part of the British National Corpus\, de
 posited at the British Library\, London\, and we produce maps of the diale
 ct variation over Great Britain. In addition\, the methods allow for acous
 tic reconstruction across the domain of interest\, allowing researchers to
  listen to the statistical analysis
LOCATION:The Richard King Room\, Darwin College
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