The purpose of this study is to evaluate the acoustic, articulatory and perceptual relevance of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in French. The AP is the lowest level of the hierarchical model of French intonation proposed by Jun and Fougeron [7]. A corpus of 22 sentences, each likely to yield 3 APs, was recorded for 4 native French speakers. Our first aim was to describe the acoustic properties of th...

In this paper, we compare the prosodic structure in Spanish learners of French and in French native speakers. For this, we will consider the accentual structure of both speaker groups during the reading, in French, of the same text in the same conditions. We started by looking at some differences between the Spanish stress system and the French stress system in order to compare Spanish learners...

This study is aimed at uncovering a way that participants in conversation predict end-of-utterance for spontaneous Japanese speech. In spontaneous everyday conversation, the participants must predict the ends of utterances of a speaker to perform smooth turn-taking without too much gap. We consider that they utilize not only syntactic factors but also prosodic factors for the end-of-utterance p...

A mode-constrained corpus-based synthesis strategy was developed for fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Japanese sentences. In the training phase, the relationship between linguistic factors and the command values (amplitudes and locations) of F0 contour generation process model was learned for a prediction module; a neural network in the current paper. Input parameters consist of linguisti...

Infant-directed speech exhibits slower speech rate, higher pitch and larger f0 excursions than adult-directed speech. Apart from these phonetic properties established in many languages, little is known on the intonational phonological structure in individual languages, i.e. pitch accents and boundary tones and their frequency distribution. Here, we investigated the intonation of infant-directed...

In recent years, researchers have developed rhythm metrics to capture patterns of timing in speech. Based on acoustic measures of vocalic and consonantal intervals, these metrics focus on variability in the durations of these segmental intervals; certain metrics (pairwise variability measures) measure the variability of pairs of immediately adjacent intervals while other metrics (interval measu...

Since Bolinger’s [1] discovery that pitch cues accentual prominence in English, a tension has arisen between two strategies: equating accent with pitch excursions and relying on perception for identifying accented words. This paper investigates the relation between prominence judgments from untrained listeners and accentual labels produced by trained transcribers. Naïve speakers of English, Spa...

Based on a represention of F0 in mora units (F0mora), several parameters and methods were introduced in order to identify accent types of accentual phrases: new candidates for F0mora estimation method; the addition of relative F0mora parameters and relative power parameters; and a new accent type identification method. The candidates for F0mora were investigated in order to find the best matchi...

French accentual phrases (APs) are characterized by the presence of a typical final fo rise (LH*) and an optional/additional initial fo rise (LHi). This study tested whether between-speaker speech imitation influenced the realization of APs tonal patterns. The experiment was based on APs containing a function word plus a bisyllabic content word, whose tonal patterns differed in the potential pl...