Production et perception des phénomènes prosodiques dans la parole : comment identifie-t-on l'insistance malgré la variabilité inter-locuteurs ?

Abstract
This research deals with the production and perception of emphatic stress in French. The central issue is to determine which prosodic variations produced by severals speakers allow the identification of emphasis by listeners. In the production experiment, four speakers were recorded while reading 24 sentences both with and without emphasis. Temporal, intonative, and intensive variations were measured and analyzed. Although the speakers adopted different speech rates, they produced a similar contrast in the speech rates between the stressed target and its contexts. Two of the four speakers modified the melodic contour on the target, i.e. by stressing the first syllable rather than the last one. The correlations between the percentage of emphasis perception and the prosodic variations suggest that the listeners may use different prosodic variations depending on the speaker and the cues he provides them with. Nevertheless, the intonative variations seem to be the most crucial cue for the perception of emphatic stress.