The Lombard effect is natural, whereby speakers automatically adjust the vocal effort to facilitate speech understanding in noise. Since real-world applications are generally involved in noisy environments, the Lombard effect of highly variable speech features due to changing background noise is one of those challenges to match these real scenarios. Existing Lombard corpora show variations in the background noise level, ranging from 35 to 96 dB sound pressure level (SPL). However, it remains unclear if we need to collect all SPLs to build a comprehensive Lombard corpus. And most existing Lombard corpora are built for English; however, Mandarin and English are different in pronunciation. This paper describes our effort to build the first open-source Lombard corpus of standard Chinese, the Mandarin Lombard Grid. The effort involves three steps: (1) Classify Mandarin Lombard styles according to different background noise levels. (2) Create the corpus containing each style. (3) Analyze Mandarin Lombard effects showing their differences from English. We found three critical Lombard styles ranging from 30 dB to 85 dB-SPL and built the corpus containing the three Lombard styles and one reference plain style. Lombard effect analyses on this corpus showed consistency and some differences from the English Lombard Grid corpus.
Cite as: Yang, Y., Chen, X., Liu, Q., Tu, W., Chen, H., Cai, L. (2022) Mandarin Lombard Grid: a Lombard-grid-like corpus of Standard Chinese. Proc. Interspeech 2022, 3078-3082, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-854
@inproceedings{yang22i_interspeech,
author={Yuhong Yang and Xufeng Chen and Qingmu Liu and Weiping Tu and Hongyang Chen and Linjun Cai},
title={{Mandarin Lombard Grid: a Lombard-grid-like corpus of Standard Chinese}},
year=2022,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2022},
pages={3078--3082},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2022-854}
}