Comparing journalistic and spontaneous speech: prosodic and spectral analysis

In this study we compare the ESTER corpus of journalistic speech [1] and the NCCF corpus of spontaneous speech [2] in terms of duration, f0 and spectral reduction in productions automatically detected as speech units between pauses. Continuation f0 rises are overall absent in spontaneous speech and speech units reveal a declination slope with less amplitude than in journalistic speech. For both corpora, lengthening starts around 60% of the sequence duration, but significantly less in spontaneous speech. Lengthening in the initial part of the sequence is observed in journalistic speech only. As expected we measure a faster speech rate in spontaneous speech with shorter vowel durations implying partly only a more important vowel reduction.