Pauses and respiratory markers of the structure of book reading

Gérard Bailly (1) , Cécilia Gouvernayre (1)

1 GIPSA-MAGIC - GIPSA - Machines parlantes, Gestes oro-faciaux, Interaction Face-à-face, Communication augmentée

The automatic reading of books by text-to-speech synthesizers requires not only the adequate encoding of the many levels of information and discourse structures in the acoustic signals but also the proper patterns of breathing, so that to pace information and organize discourse at an ecological rhythm. We analyze here the locations and durations of near 4,000 pauses produced by voice donor who has read several audiobooks, freely available on the web. Since the voice was recorded by a close microphone, we also characterized the acoustic markers of inhalation and show that the delay between end of phonation and air intake can be considered as an additional marker of thematic continuity between the two adjacent speech chunks that complements well-documented prosodic cues such as the preboundary tone and lengthening or the pause duration.

Mots clés: prediction of pause locations and durations; respiration; pause; prosody

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Gérard Bailly, Cécilia Gouvernayre. Pauses and respiratory markers of the structure of book reading. Interspeech 2012 - 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Sep 2012, Portland, United States. pp.Thu.O9d.05. ⟨hal-00741667⟩