In this contribution, we address the realization of well-known pronunciation variants in French: the so-called mute e (or schwa), liaisons (sandhi phenomena) and mid vowels in non- word-final syllables, whose behavior with regards to vowel harmony is investigated. We compare the occurrences of such pronunciation variants in large corpora of read and spontaneous speech. Their phonetic transcriptions are automatically obtained by aligning the acoustic data with a pronunciation graph, derived from orthographic transcriptions and pronunciation dictionaries which include relevant pronunciation variants. The frequency of occurrence of schwas and liaisons, together with the pronunciation of mid vowels according to their underlying representation are then computed and analysed linguistically.
Cite as: Mareüil, P.B.d., Adda-Decker, M. (2002) Studying pronunciation variants in French by using alignment techniques. Proc. 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2002), 2273-2276, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.2002-622
@inproceedings{mareuil02_icslp,
author={Philippe Boula de Mareüil and Martine Adda-Decker},
title={{Studying pronunciation variants in French by using alignment techniques}},
year=2002,
booktitle={Proc. 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2002)},
pages={2273--2276},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.2002-622}
}