Prominence perception and accent detection in French. a corpus-based account

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to shed new light on the accentuation\nin French, more precisely to discuss the role of grammatical\nconstraints and of phonetic factors implied in the perception of\nFrench final and non final accent. The study is based on the\nanalysis of a 70-minute long corpus, including various\nspeaking styles. The corpus has been annotated manually and\nautomatically for prominence detection and tagged semiautomatically\nfor grammatical categories. We first describe the\nrate of accentuation for each grammatical category (discussing\nthe notion of “clitic” in French) and then discuss the\ndivergences between the manual and automatic prominence\ndetection, in relation with the phonological structure.