Evaluating prosodic similarity as a means towards L2 teacher's prosodic control training
Résumé
Studies on professional impersonators and naïve speakers has underlined that speech imitation proficiency varies across speakers. Imitation in speech supposes that a speaker succeeds in reproducing specific features of the perceived speech. Because of the inherent variability of human speech behaviors, the question lies open whether different speakers can accurately imitate phonetic features, and more specifically prosodic patterns. This exploratory study proposes to test f0 contours’ imitation of 4 sentences originally pronounced by a female speaker, by 4 naïve listeners undertaking 3 different tasks: mere repetition, imitation and exaggeration of the perceived sentences. Two tests were performed: imitated sentences and models were time-warped and objective comparisons were performed using two (dis)similarity measures reported in the literature; a panel of 15 listeners evaluated perceptually the same set of sentences during an AX similarity judgment task. Similarity scores were used to build multiple rankings in order to observe the correlation between the two tests’ rankings and to evaluate prosodic imitation proficiency across speakers/listeners. This research has implication for L2 phonetic correction using the Verbo-Tonal Method, which requires excellent prosodic awareness and control by the teacher in the production of lexicalized and delexicalized sentences.