A Contrastive Acoustic-Phonetic Analysis of Slovenian and English Diphthongs

This paper aims to narrow the gap between specific and general language theory by initiating contrastive acoustic-phonetic research of Slovenian and English diphthongs. Our ultimate goal is to investigate acoustic-phonetic similarities of the diphthongs across languages in the context of possible portability of resources between the languages. In general, the paper addresses the possibility of using language resources of well-resourced languages to efficiently bootstrap the human language technologies (HLT) of the underresourced language. Therefore, as initial step we performed the contrastive analysis using English as an example "donor" language that is well researched with extensive language resources and Slovenian, the official and widely used language of Slovenia that is challenged by the significant lack of resources such as spoken, written or multimedia language corpora. ✷ Young Investigator supported by the MŠZŠ of the Republic of Slovenia and Socrates/Erasmus exchange student under the multilateral agreement UL D-IV-1/99-JM/Kc.