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A Typology of Spontaneous Speech

  • Chapter
Computing Prosody

Abstract

Building accurate computational models of the prosody of spontaneous speech is a daunting enterprise because speech produced without a carefully devised written script does not readily allow the explicit control and repeated observation that read “lab speech” corpora are designed to provide. The prosody of spontaneous speech is affected profoundly by the social and rhetorical context of the recording, and these contextual factors can themselves vary widely in ways beyond our current understanding and control, so that there are many types of spontaneous speech which differ substantially not just from lab speech but also from each other. This paper motivates the study of spontaneous speech by describing several important aspects of prosody and its function that cannot be studied fully in lab speech, either because the relevant phenomena do not occur at all in lab speech or occur in a limited range of types. It then lists and characterizes some kinds of spontaneous speech that have been successfully recorded and analysed by scientists working on some of these aspects of prosody or on related discourse phenomena.

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  1. Mary E. Beckman
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  1. ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Labs, 2-2, Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, 619-02, Kyoto, Japan

    Yoshinori Sagisaka , Nick Campbell  & Norio Higuchi ,  & 

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Beckman, M.E. (1997). A Typology of Spontaneous Speech. In: Sagisaka, Y., Campbell, N., Higuchi, N. (eds) Computing Prosody. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-2258-3_2

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