Kraljevski, IvanIvanKraljevskiBissiri, Maria PaolaMaria PaolaBissiriDuckhorn, FrankFrankDuckhornTschöpe, ConstanzeConstanzeTschöpeWolff, MatthiasMatthiasWolff2022-03-1515.9.20212021https://publica.fraunhofer.de/handle/publica/41207510.21437/Interspeech.2021-1101We 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 occurren ce 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.englottal stopsacoustic modelingunder-resourced languages620666conference paper