Prosodic evaluation of accent distributions in spoken news bulletins of Flemish newsreaders.

The current article describes research on whether the goodness of a particular speaking style correlates with the way speakers distribute pitch accents in their speech. Study 1 analyzed two Flemish newsreaders, who, according to poll ratings, had previously been judged to represent a good vs bad speaker. A perception study in which participants had to assess the quality of spoken paragraphs produced by either of the two speakers confirmed that one speaker was rated as significantly and consistently better than the other one. An exploration of the accent distributions in those paragraphs showed that the accent distributions of the better speaker were more similar to the ones of a gold standard, i.e., the accent distributions as predicted by two independent intonation experts. Study 2 compared synthetic versions of a selection of the paragraphs of study 1, generated by a Dutch text-to-speech system. It compared three basically identical versions of the texts, except that they had different accent distributions according to the gold standard, or to distributions as observed in the productions of the two newsreaders. A perception study revealed that the versions of the bad speaker were rated as being significantly worse than the other versions. The two studies thus show that variation in accent distribution can indeed affect the way spoken texts are assessed in terms of their perceived quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]