14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Intonation of Spontaneous Speech in French

Philippe Martin

University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Phonosyntactic models of intonation are usually inferred from read speech data, and bear no or limited expected validity for spontaneous speech. To investigate this commonly accepted assumption, we analyzed a sample corpus of spontaneous speech recorded in various interviews broadcast on a French radio station. Experimental results were confronted to theoretical predictions, pertaining to the encoding of the prosodic structure in French and to constraints governing the relationship between the syntactic and the prosodic structures. The data involve pitch accents characteristics (rising and falling contour distribution), stress and syntactic clash conditions, eurhythmy and number of syllables in the prosodic word.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Martin, Philippe (1999): "Intonation of spontaneous speech in French", In ICPhS-14, 17-20.