The paper is about the research on possibilities of modelling prosodic-semantic-pragmatic variability of spoken discourse. The experiments were carried out on the material of German, Russian and English. The main objective of the research is to detect interdependence between prosodic organisation and linguistic structure of the utterance as far as phonetic, phonological, lexical, syntactical, semantic aspects are concerned. Reconstruction of the spoken discourse in English, Russian, German let us develop a range of models of discourse and single out factors which determine variability of phonetic, prosodic, semantic and pragmatic features. This is a key to understanding the procedure of multi-channel processing of human speech in the environment of complicated communication which involves a wide gamut of components which are to be taken into consideration while structuring and restructuring spoken discourse. As a part of the project a phonetic base of Russian, German and English authentic speech was built. The base (corpus of spoken speech samples) includes utterances representing various types of spoken discourse applicable to a certain subject domain. While building the corpus the factor of contact / distant communication were taken into account. All the samples were transcribed and labeled. As a result some features were singled out on prosodic and semantic levels which were used by the listeners involved into experiments on discourse reconstruction. The most frequently employed features were the following: integral semantic content of the utterances, melodic curve of the utterance, stress and accent of certain syllables. Loudness was named as the least frequently employed feature to draw conclusion regarding reconstruction of the semantic content of the utterance. The rest of the features, description of the experiments and the methodology of the experiments and statistical analysis of the obtained data are presented in the full version of the paper.
Cite as: Potapova, R.K., Khitina, M.V., Yakovleva, E.B. (2004) Spoken discourse and perceptual rules of its semantic reconstruction. Proc. 9th Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2004), 445-447
@inproceedings{potapova04_specom,
author={Rodmonga K. Potapova and M. V. Khitina and E. B. Yakovleva},
title={{Spoken discourse and perceptual rules of its semantic reconstruction}},
year=2004,
booktitle={Proc. 9th Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2004)},
pages={445--447}
}