Naïve listeners’ perception of prominence and boundary in French spontaneous speech

Abstract

Our main goal here is to explore the link between naive listeners' perception of prominences and boundaries in spontaneous speech and experts' annotation of prosodic hierarchy and accentuation in French. We first present the design of our corpus, which consists in 133 utterances extracted from the Corpus of Interactional Data (CID). 73 naive listeners judged prominences and boundaries using three levels of prominence and boundary (“none”, “weak” and “strong”) during two separate tasks. Prominence-Scores and Boundary-Scores reveal good reliability between listeners. With a strong agreement between the two experts' annotation, we then examine the extent to which naive judgments are in line with experts' annotations.