Perception of breaks and discourse boundaries in spontaneous speech: developping an on-line technique

Cyril Auran (1) , Annie Colas (1) , Cristel Portes (1) , Monique Vion (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

The goal of this paper is to present an on-line paradigm being developed among the ProDiGE research group at the "Parole et Langage" laboratory at the University of Provence in Aix-en-Provence. This paradigm aims at studying the perception of breaks and discourse boundaries by expert and/or naive listeners. An experimental technique was designed to compare the listeners' perception of breaks and boundaries in four different speech types (normal, low-pass filtered, re-synthezised and re-synthesized with phoneme conversion).
Thirty naive subjects took part in the present experiment in which two versions of a one-minute tape-recorded spontaneous speech sample were compared (normal vs. converted phonemes).
The results show similar total numbers and average inter-subject agreement values for breaks identified by a majority of subjects; however, segmented portions differ both in the position of their boundaries and in the nature of the textual units they isolate.

Mots clés: technique on-line; perception; on-line technique

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie et comportements

Cyril Auran, Annie Colas, Cristel Portes, Monique Vion. Perception of breaks and discourse boundaries in spontaneous speech: developping an on-line technique. 2005, pp.1-7. ⟨hal-00136763⟩