Prosody in Speech Recognition and Understanding October 22-24, 2001 Molly Pitcher Inn, Red Bank, NJ, USA

Prosodic Correlates of Directly Reported Speech: Evidence from Conversational Speech

Wouter Jansen (1), Michelle L. Gregory (2), Jason M. Brenier (3)

(1) Department of Linguistics, University of Groningen, Netherlandsw
(2) Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown Univ., USA
(3) Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA

This paper investigates the prosodic characteristics of reported speech in the Switchboard corpus. We find that directly reported speech is signalled by a greater overall pitch range than the surrounding narrative material and is typically preceded by intonational phrase boundaries. By contrast, prosody does not seem to distinguish indirectly reported speech from ordinary narrative speech. The implications of these findings for ASR are discussed.

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Bibliographic reference.  Jansen, Wouter / Gregory, Michelle L. / Brenier, Jason M. (2001): "Prosodic correlates of directly reported speech: Evidence from conversational speech", In Prosody-2001, paper 14.