6.911 | January IAP 2006 | Undergraduate

Transcribing Prosodic Structure of Spoken Utterances with ToBI

Exercises

ToBI Tutorial Exercises

There are exercises for sections 2.1 through 2.9 of this ToBI tutorial. Each set of exercises consists of a document with an explanation of the exercises, and a number of associated soundfiles and TextGrids. It is important that you read the exercise explanations for each section, as the various files have been prepared for different purposes: some are meant for labelling, and others are just for listening.

There are 3 types of exercises:

Type A: listening. Usually these files consist of several productions of the same contour, or contrasting contours.

Type B: labelling. These wav files will generally have pre-made TextGrids with the words tier filled, and in some cases, some partial labels. Labelling files will also have an associated TextGrid file with “-ans” as part of the filename with answers.

Type C: other. These are usually production exercises. They are most effective if you can record yourself on your computer, and examine the results in Praat (or another sound application).

You may find it helpful to use a script in Praat that allows you to open multiple files at the same time. One such script is available at Mietta’s Praat scripts, where a Praat user has made Praat scripts that she’s written available to the public.

The following script allows you to open all Praat-readable files in a directory.

EXERCISES TOPICS
Exercise 2.1 Praat & H* L-L%
Exercise 2.2 L* H-H%
Exercise 2.3 More than One Pitch Accent in a Phrase
Exercise 2.4 Other Phrase Accent-boundary Tone Combinations
Exercise 2.5 L+H* and L*+H
Exercise 2.6 !H*
Exercise 2.7 Bi-tonals with a !H Element
Exercise 2.8 3 Breaks, and The L- and H- Phrase Accents
Exercise 2.9 The Downstepped High Phrase Accent (!H-)
Learning Resource Types
Online Textbook
Lecture Notes
Activity Assignments