This work aims at improving our knowledge of links between prosody and pronunciation variants in French. An original methodology is proposed to study prosodic regularities of French words via average f0 profiles, by making use of automatic processing and 13 hours of broadcast news speech. Investigated influential factors include word syllable length, duration, word-final schwa, parts of speech....

Near-perfect atttomatic accent assignment is attainable,for citation-s~le speech, but better computational models art, needed to predict accent in extended, spontaneous discourses. This paper presents an empirically motivated theory of the discourse ]bcttsing nature of accent in spontaneous speech. Hypotheses based on this theory lead to a new approach to accent prediction, in which patterns o ...