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Schwa Realization in French: Using Automatic Speech Processing to Study Phonological and Socio-linguistic Factors in Large Corpora
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In: Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01837179 ; Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association , ISCA, Aug 2017, Stockholm, Sweden (2017)
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Abstract:
International audience ; The study investigates different factors influencing schwa real-ization in French: phonological factors, speech style, gender,and socio-professional status. Three large corpora, two of pub-lic journalistic speech (ESTER and ETAPE) and one of casualspeech (NCCFr) are used. The absence/presence of schwa isautomatically decided via forced alignment, which has a suc-cessful performance rate of 95%. Only polysyllabic words in-cluding a potential schwa in the word-initial syllable are studiedin order to control for variability in word structure and position.The effect of the left context, grouped into classes of a wordfinal vowel or final consonant or a pause, is studied. Wordspreceded by a vowel (V#) tend to favor schwa deletion. Inter-estingly, words preceded by a consonant or a pause have similarbehaviors: speakers tend to maintain schwa in both contexts.As can be expected, the more casual the speech, the more fre-quently schwa is dropped. Males tend to delete more schwasthan females, and journalists are more likely to delete schwathan politicians. These results suggest that beyond phonology,other factors such as gender, style and socio-professional statusinfluence the realization of schwa.
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Keyword:
[INFO.INFO-CL]Computer Science [cs]/Computation and Language [cs.CL]; [INFO]Computer Science [cs]; forced alignment; large corpora; mixed mode; pre-boundary context; schwa; socio-linguistic factor; speechstyle
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URL: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01837179
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