title: Chronset: An automated tool for detecting speech onset.
abstract: The analysis of speech onset times has a longstanding tradition in experimental psychology as a measure of how a stimulus influences a spoken response. Yet the lack of accurate automatic methods to measure such effects forces researchers to rely on time-intensive manual or semiautomatic techniques. Here we present Chronset, a fully automated tool that estimates speech onset on the basis of multiple acoustic features extracted via multitaper spectral analysis. Using statistical optimization techniques, we show that the present approach generalizes across different languages and speaker populations, and that it extracts speech onset latencies that agree closely with those from human observations. Finally, we show how the present approach can be integrated with previous work (Jansen & Watter Behavior Research Methods, 40:744-751, 2008) to further improve the precision of onset detection. Chronset is publicly available online at www.bcbl.eu/databases/chronset .
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Birmingham, United Kingdom. fredericrouxw@gmail.com.|Basque Center on Brain, Cognition & Language, San Sebastian, Spain. fredericrouxw@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Frédéric
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Roux
authors.affiliation: Basque Center on Brain, Cognition & Language, San Sebastian, Spain.|Department of Psychology, Centre for French & Linguistics at Scarborough, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: Blair C
authors.initials: BC
authors.lastname: Armstrong
authors.affiliation: Basque Center on Brain, Cognition & Language, San Sebastian, Spain.|Ikerbasque Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain.|UPV/EHU Universidad del Pais Vasco, Leioa, Spain.
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Carreiras
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D000465:Algorithms; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Automatic detection; Optimization; Reading aloud; Spectral analysis; Speech onset