This study presents a comparison of French lexical fundamental frequency (f0) profiles for different speaking styles using phonemic, syllabic and lexical transcriptions as well as partof- speech annotations. Three speaking styles (broadcast news, broadcast conferences and conversations) with over 20 hours of speech were used. Syllabic word length and POS were considered as influential factors. Results confirm word final syllable accentuation as common tendency in French. The study highlights noun word-initial accentuation after determiner for BN style speech. Journalistic prepared speech features lexical words with more dynamic f0 profiles on average versus more stable flat profiles for our spontaneous data. Future works include localization of named-entity and/or focus of speech within the framework of discriminative classifiers.

Index Terms: fundamental frequency, lexical f0 profiles, French, word-final accentuation, POS annotation, corpus-based study, automatic processing.