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Prosody Evaluation as a Diagnostic Process: Subjective vs. Objective Measurements

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Abstract

A set of perception experiments, using reiterant and lexicalised speech, was designed to perform a diagnostic of the relative implication of prosody in the segmentation and hierarchisation of speech. Both natural and synthetic intonation were evaluated. Then, two distance measures—correlation and root-mean-square distance on the acoustic parameters (F0, syllabic duration and intensity)—were applied to match the perception results. This objective vs. subjective comparison underlines which acoustic cues are used by listeners to judge the adequacy of prosody in performing a given function such as demarcation. Results can be summarized by a scale of the perceptual distance between two demarcation functions. This study also points out the ability of listeners to retrieve pertinent information on the basis of pure prosodic stimuli.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de la Communication Parlée (ICP), Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France

    Albert Rilliard & Véronique Aubergé

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  1. Albert Rilliard
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  2. Véronique Aubergé
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Rilliard, A., Aubergé, V. Prosody Evaluation as a Diagnostic Process: Subjective vs. Objective Measurements. International Journal of Speech Technology 6, 409–418 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025717202812

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