Expectations for dicourse genre identification: a prosodic study

Speech can be divided into discourse genres based on the contextual environment it occurs in (e.g. political speech, sport commentary speech, etc.). The present study investigated whether listeners can distinguish between speech from different discourse genres on the basis of acoustic prosodic cues only 1. In a perception experiment with delexicalized speech 70 listeners with varying experience in French (native speakers, nonnative speakers, and non-speakers) were asked to identify four different types of discourse genres (church service, political, journal, and sport commentary). Results revealed a fair identification ability with a significant increase in performance with increasing experience in French. Identification confusion was used to cluster discourse genres according to their perceptual similarity. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-111806 Originally published at: Obin, Nicolas; Dellwo, Volker; Lacheret, Anne; Rodet, Xavier (2010). Expectations for dicourse genre identification: a prosodic study. In: Interspeech 2010, Makuhari/Japan, 26 September 2010 30 September 2010. Expectations for Discourse Genre Identification: a Prosodic Study Nicolas Obin , Volker Dellwo , Anne Lacheret , Xavier Rodet 1 1 Analysis-Synthesis Team, IRCAM, Paris, France 2 University College of London, London, UK. 3 Modyco Lab., University of Paris Ouest La Défense, Nanterre, France [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]