Investigating Syllabic Structure and Its Variation in Speech from French Radio Interviews

In this paper, we investigate syllabic structure and its variation in a corpus of French radio interview speech. The aim of this study is to relate sequential pronunciation variants, i.e. variants with different numbers of phonemes to syllabic restructuring. In French schwa and liaison are two well-known phenomena which allow for a variable number of phonemes. We first aim to quantify syllabic restructuring due to these phenomena. Our second aim is to identify other syllabic restructuring phenomena due to omitted vowels (i.e. syllable nuclei) or even omitted syllables. The radio speech corpus is comprised of 30 1-hour shows of interviews mostly involving one professional anchor speaker and an artist or a politician. The speech style is fluent, spontaneous and only partially prepared. Syllable distributions computed from a word level representation are compared to those emerging from speech. Results confirm that the optional schwa vowel contributes to a large amount of variation in syllabic structure. Less well-described phenomena have been observed: other vowels than schwa, such as /u/, /e/ and / / appear to be optional in unstressed contexts. A substantial percentage of occurrences of word-final syllables may completely disappear.