Glottal Stops in Upper Sorbian: A Data-Driven Approach

We present a data-driven approach for the quantitative analysis of glottal stops before word-initial vowels in Upper Sorbian, a West Slavic minority language spoken in Germany. Glottal stops are word-boundary markers and their detection can improve the performance of automatic speech recognition and speech synthesis systems. We employed cross-language transfer using an acoustic model in German to develop a forced-alignment method for the phonetic segmentation of a read-speech corpus in Upper Sorbian. The missing phonemic units were created by combining the existing phoneme models. In the forced-alignment procedure, the glottal stops were considered optional in front of word-initial vowels. To investigate the influence of speaker type (males, females, and children) and vowel on the occurrence of glottal stops, binomial regression analysis with a generalized linear mixed model was performed. Results show that children glottalize word-initial vowels more frequently than adults, and that glottal stop occurrences are influenced by vowel quality.