Prosody Diagnostic Using Reiterant Speech

This paper describes a set of experiments using French reiterant speech (on a canonical [ma] syllable). Experiments are designed to perform a diagnostic evaluation of the linguistic performances of synthetic prosody. Different experimental procedures are organised to match either synthetic or natural utterance, in their reiterant or lexicalised versions. The natural procedures are used as a reference (natural prosody is supposed to be well-formed), synthetic ones test the performance of the synthetic prosody, and the mixed synthetic and natural conditions (presented here) measure the distance between the ideal natural prosody and the actual synthetic realisation. The Analysis of the results of the last two experimental conditions shows this paradigm ability to point out which linguistic function is performed by a given prosody, and into what extents.