ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2014

Speaking style prosodic variation: an 8-hour 9-style corpus study

Jean Philippe Goldman, Tea Prs̈ir, George Christodoulides, Antoine Auchlin

This paper presents the results of a prosodic and phonostylistic analysis based on C-PhonoGenre, a 9-hour-long spoken French corpus, including 10 speakers on average recorded in 10 speaking situations. The corpus was automatically segmented at phonetic, syllabic, word levels (EasyAlign), and larger pause- separated units. Part-of-speech annotation (DisMo) and prominent syllable detection (ProsoProm) was added automatically. The corpus was also manually annotated at the syllabic level for stylistic variants, such as post-tonic schwas, liaisons, elisions, disfluencies, audible breaths and noises. Acoustic analyses (ProsoReport, DurationAnalyser) provide more than 100 micro- and macro-prosodic measures, which we correlate with the phonostylistic and linguistic annotation. This analysis finally yields a contrastive, fine-grained prosometric description of phonostylistic and situational variation, over 4 situational gradual dimensions: audience, media, preparation, and interactivity. Further statistical analysis was carried out to explore the discriminative and explanatory power of combinations of prosodic measures.