Impact of prosodic position on vocalic space in German and French

International audienceThe relation between prosodic constituents of different levels (the prosodic hierarchy) and the realization of phonemes is investigated in French and German broadcast speech. Four levels of prosodic categories are defined and the boundaries are automatically derived using syntactic chunking and forced alignment. We show that the higher a vowel position within the prosodic structure, the more strengthened are its acoustic-prosodic correlates. Our results suggest that the influence of the prosodic hierarchy is slightly weaker in German, supposedly due to its lexical stress patterns