Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Association and Alignment of French Rises and their Role in Discourse Segmentation

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Under the direction of Dr. Mary E. Beckman, Ms. Pauline Welby will collect data for her doctoral dissertation on intonational rises in French as cues to identifying where one word ends and another begins. Such cues are necessary since speech lacks the spaces between words that writing often has. In English, stress is a good cue to segmentation since content words (nouns, adjectives, etc.) typically begin with stressed syllables. French lacks such stress cues, but the timing of intonational rises there has been hypothesized to fill a similar role. Previous research has shown that French intonation is characterized by an obligatory rise at the end of a phrase and an optional early rise near the beginning. Two production experiments will examine influences on the early rise (e.g., speaking rate) and the timing of both rises. Three perception experiments will examine the role of the early rise in speech segmentation. Items will be read by a native speaker and recorded; the timing of the rises will then be varied using computer resynthesis. Participants will listen to stimuli and make various types of responses. For example, one experiment will use invented non-words, whose segmentation reflects that of unknown but real words. For example, the same sequence of syllables could be interpreted as the nonsense word "melamondine" or as the phrase "mes lamondines" ('my' plus the nonsense word "lamondine"). According to one hypothesis, an early rise beginning at the first syllable will bias the listener to the one-word interpretation ("melamondine"), while an early rise beginning at the second syllable will bias the listener to the two-word interpretation ("mes lamondines"). This research is significant both for theoretical linguistics and for the development of speech technologies. It will increase our understanding of French intonation and of speech segmentation. In addition, a better understanding of segmentation strategies can improve automatic speech recognition systems, which lag far behind humans in segmentation accuracy. A more refined account of the timing facts might also improve speech synthesis systems, since poor intonation makes synthesized speech difficult to understand. In turn, improvements in speech technology provide scientists with better tools for future speech research.