Philippe Martin

Université Paris 7

2. spoken communication and prosody

Experimental analysis of prosody - syntax interaction in spontaneous speech

Traditional syntactic descriptions of French are essentially based on the “well formed” concept, as can be felt by speakers when they hear or read sentences they never read or heard before. In fact, this concept applies to written productions, whose “well formed” characteristics are confronted to written material thought in primary and secondary schools, or found in the socially acceptable literary texts. This kind of syntactic description is ill adapted to properly describe spontaneous speech, as demonstrate the poor performances of automatic speech recognition systems using syntactic models based on written texts. In order to deal with the description of syntactic properties of spontaneous speech, we present some examples of analysis performed on French and Italian spontaneous speech data. To analyze these examples, we use a macro syntactic approach, which, briefly stated, assumes that spontaneous speech sentences result from the concatenation of sequences of well formed segments (in the classical sense) organized in the sentence structure by dependency relations (“rection” and “paratax”) indicated by prosody. The experimental data were obtained with WinPitchPro, a software program dedicated to the transcription, alignment and acoustic analysis of large corpora. The illustrative examples were taken from the C-ORAL-ROM recently released set of corpora of spontaneous speech in four romance languages and illustrate clearly the interaction mechanisms existing between prosody and macro syntactic units in spontaneous speech production.