Fine-Tuning Whisper for Inclusive Prosodic Stress Analysis

Abstract: Prosody plays a crucial role in speech perception, influencing both human understanding and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Despite its importance, prosodic stress remains under-studied due to the challenge of efficiently analyzing it. This study explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper large-v2 ASR model to recognize phrasal, lexical, and contrastive stress in speech. Using a dataset of 66 native English speakers, including male, female, neurotypical, and neurodivergent individuals, we assess the model's ability to generalize stress patterns and classify speakers by neurotype and gender based on brief speech samples. Our results highlight near-human accuracy in ASR performance across all three stress types and near-perfect precision in classifying gender and neurotype. By improving prosody-aware ASR, this work contributes to equitable and robust transcription technologies for diverse populations.