CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH PROSODY : F0 Slopes and Levels and Vowel Durations in Laboratory Data

International audienceProsody conveys linguistic and extralinguistic information through prosodic features which are either language dependent or language independent. In addition, each speaker has unique physiological characteristics of speech production and speaking style, and thus speaker-specific characteristics are also reflected in prosody. Distinguishing the language-specific and speaker-specific aspects of prosody using acoustic parameters is a very complex task. Therefore, it is very challenging to extract and represent prosodic features which can differenciate one language from the other or one speaker from the other. The goal of our study is to investigate whether the prosody of isolated sentences in French and English is determined by their shared syntactic structures and whether the prosodic features used by the two languages are different or similar. In our cross-linguistic comparison of the prosodic parameters, two approaches are used. First, F0 slopes measured on target words in the sentences are analyzed by fitting mixed linear regression models (R package lme4). Secondly vowel duration and F0 values for each syllable are prosodically annotated using an automatic prosodic transcriber and the symbolic and numeric values are used in a more qualitative comparison of our data. It appears from the analyzed data that the observed F0 curves in our corpus do not always correspond to linguistic theory and that the output of the automatic prosodic transcriber provides relevent information for a cross-linguistic study of the prosody