Phonetic variations: Impact of the communicative situation

While speech synthesis research is now focussing on the generation of various speaking styles or emotions, very few stud- ies have considered the possibility of including phonetic variations according to the communicative situation of the targeted speech (sports commentaries, TV news, etc.). This paper proposes a phonetic analysis of large French corpora to assess the influence exerted by three situational ‘traits’: read/spontaneous, media/non-media and expressive/non-expressive. It shows that some variations, like elision, tend to be more frequent in spontaneous and non-media speech, conversely to liaisons which appear more often in read and media speech. Interestingly, no phonetic variation draws a clearcut distinction between expressive and non-expressive speech. Finally, a prosodic analysis indicates that the phonetic variations are not directly correlated with the rhythmic features of their corresponding situational ‘trait