ISCA Archive Prosody 2001
ISCA Archive Prosody 2001

Prosodic correlates of directly reported speech: Evidence from conversational speech

Wouter Jansen, Michelle L. Gregory, Jason M. Brenier

This paper investigates the prosodic characteristics of reported speech in the Switchboard corpus. We find that directly reported speech is signalled by a greater overall pitch range than the surrounding narrative material and is typically preceded by intonational phrase boundaries. By contrast, prosody does not seem to distinguish indirectly reported speech from ordinary narrative speech. The implications of these findings for ASR are discussed.