SRPP – Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie

SRPP Shihao DU & Adamantios Gafos

bowei.shao — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:53:22 +0000

SRPP Simon Devauchelle & Lucas Ondel

bowei.shao — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:50:10 +0000

SRPP Yiya chen

bowei.shao — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:49:09 +0000

SRPP Miao Zhang, Eleanor Chodroff

bowei.shao — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:48:09 +0000

Online SRPP A system in transition: Gradient cues and emerging categories in Western Andalusian /b d ɡ/

bowei.shao — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:45:01 +0000

What remains of a sound after it is gone? In Western Andalusian Spanish, coda /s/ is routinely aspirated or deleted, yet una bota ‘a boot’ and unas botas ‘some boots’ need
not sound alike. Where other varieties have soft approximants [β̞ ð̞ ɣ̞], the weakened /s/ leaves behind longer, noisier fricatives [v ð ɣ], named here as Compensatory Voiced
Fricatives (CVFs). Long noted by dialectologists but not acoustically measured before, CVFs offer a window onto sound change in progress, and onto a central question in
phonology: when does gradient phonetic detail become part of the sound system?
This talk brings together a production study with speakers from Seville and three perception experiments with Western Andalusian and Northern Peninsular listeners.
The picture that emerges is one of uneven change. Of the acoustic properties that set CVFs apart, duration stands out: it is the clearest marker in production and the cue
Andalusian listeners use to recover the plural, with their responses shifting near the same duration that separates CVFs from approximants in speech. Frication, by contrast,
remains gradient and varies from speaker to speaker. Northern listeners, lacking this experience, rely instead on an overt [s].
CVFs thus illustrate phonologization still under way, advancing one property at a time, and show how dialect-specific experience shapes which fine phonetic details become
categories. The talk closes with what this case suggests about how gradient variation enters phonological representation.

SRPP Longer and “stronger”: Acoustic evidence for constriction strength and laryngeal tension in Italian geminates

bowei.shao — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:43:25 +0000

This talk evaluates two conflicting views on Italian gemination, e.g. /fato/ ‘fate’ vs. /fatto/ ‘fact’: the mainstream ‘duration-only’ picture, positing that gemination involves an essentially duration-based contrast, and the ‘alternative picture’, identifying systematic non-durational acoustic co-variants, likely linked to increased consonant constriction strength and laryngeal tension in geminates. It comprehensively examines temporal and non-temporal acoustic parameters across three regional varieties: Veneto (north), Rome (centre), and Calabria (south).

For stop consonants, linear mixed models confirm expected temporal differences while revealing a significantly longer post-release phase (PRP) for geminates in some cases. Crucially, non-temporal effects are also significant: geminates exhibit higher fundamental frequency (f0) in flanking vowels, lower closure voicing proportions, as well as significantly higher intensity differences in C(ː)V intervals (IntDiff) and maximum intensity-envelope velocity within the same intervals (MaxVel), indexing increased constriction strength. Voiceless geminates also show higher H1*-H2* values at V2 onset and a similar tendency at V1 offset, suggesting increased breathiness likely driven by higher laryngeal tension through glottal opening. Random Forest classification demonstrates that while durational parameters alone yield 94.5% accuracy, non-temporal cues independently achieve 80.2% accuracy, driven primarily by IntDiff.

The analysis further examines voiced labiodental fricatives (/v/ and /vː/), revealing extensive allophonic variation. Singleton /v/ frequently surfaces as a weakened approximant [ʋ] (47%), whereas the geminate /vː/ frequently exhibits a strengthened, often plosive-like ([b̪ː]), realisation (36%).

Ultimately, the systematic co-variation of constriction strength and laryngeal tension challenges the ‘duration-only’ consensus. These findings raise and echo theoretical questions regarding whether phonological representations of Italian gemination must be enriched beyond standard timing structures to account for these robust non-temporal mechanisms.

SRPP (Webinaire) Lip tracking as an easy-to-use method when investigating articulatory patterns

bowei.shao — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 10:03:23 +0000

In this talk, I will present a lip tracking method that can be used to study speech articulation and confront articulatory data with acoustic evidence of stop lenition. While earlier motion capture methods required special equipment, new developments were made in recent years that allow for optical lip tracking based on internet camera recordings. I will discuss two of my studies that use this method and implementations presented by other authors that confirm its validity for segmental research.
First, I will show that looking at lip aperture measurements helps determine the contexts and extent of /p b/ weakening in Canary Islands Spanish. Lip tracking data reveals that:

– stop lenition is limited to postvocalic position
– stop lenition Is blocked in derived postvocalic position
– there are asymmetries in prosodic effects when compared to acoustics.

The second study looks at final /t d/ deletion in American English. Here, the discrepancy between articulation and acoustics is under analysis and lip movement data is used to test the completeness of the process. /t d/ trapped in between bilabials are used to track lip aperture changes that may be semblant of incomplete pronunciations. Ultrasound data of tongue blade movements is used to confirm lip trajectories as proxies of alveolar gestures.

SRPP Spatiotemporal articulatory modulations under stress: evidence from Italian

bowei.shao — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 09:58:44 +0000

Segments within the domain of stress undergo articulatory strengthening along two dimensions: time, involving enhancement of gesture duration, and space, involving enhancement of gesture displacement. However, the way in which these dimensions interact with each other across phonetic contexts remains underinvestigated. Moreover, while research on stress has mainly focused on stressed vowels, recent findings suggest that the effects of stress may extend over a broader window. In this talk, we present an investigation of stress-induced articulatory strengthening in Italian, in which we jointly analyzed the temporal and spatial characteristics of articulatory gestures using a principal component framework. Our findings reveal that temporal and spatial modulations constitute independent dimensions of stress-induced strengthening, whose relative contribution varies across segments. We also show that both dimensions extend beyond the stressed vowel, affecting the realization of neighboring consonants and vowels. We discuss these results in light of articulatory models of prosody in which stress is represented as a modulation gesture scoping over prosodic constituents and shaping the spatiotemporal organization of the constriction gestures realized within its domain.

SRPP (Webinaire) Tone Development and Change

bowei.shao — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 14:31:38 +0000

This talk presents two research projects themed on tone development and change. The first part focuses on contemporary tonal variation, through an acoustic-phonetic case study of tones in Plastic Mandarin, a newly crystallised urban variety spoken by younger generations in Changsha, China. Drawing on fieldwork speech data and analysis using Generalised Additive Mixed Models, the study reveals how citation tones and neutral tone are realised in both Standard and Plastic Mandarin and situates the findings within the framework of new dialect formation. The second part looks to the past, exploring a possible pathway of tone emergence through a psychoacoustic experiment. This on-going big team science project aims to advance our understanding of microprosodic pitch perception in speech. Together, these studies offer new insights into the mechanisms underlying tone innovation and change in human language.

SRPP Beyond Uvularization: Acoustic and Articulatory Evidence from Mawo Qiang Vowels

bowei.shao — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 14:29:51 +0000

This study examines the phonetic basis of a contrast described between plain and uvularized vowels in Mawo Qiang (Qiangic, Sino-Tibetan). Building on Evans et al. (2016), it adopts their analytical framework while expanding the empirical basis through newly collected data from nine speakers, analyzed using acoustic measurements and articulatory modelling. The acoustic results show that the contrast is primarily signaled by lowering of F2, whereas changes in F1 and higher-formant measures are weaker and more variable, depending on vowel quality and speaker. The articulatory modelling suggests that vowels described as uvularized often involve posterior displacement of the tongue dorsum, but this is neither the sole nor a uniform strategy. Across vowel pairs, the contrast may also involve tongue lowering, pharyngealization-like configurations, or differences in vowel fronting rather than straightforward retraction. Taken together, these findings indicate that the opposition is acoustically robust but phonetically heterogeneous. Rather than reflecting a single invariant uvular gesture, the data indicate multiple articulatory strategies converging on a similar acoustic effect, particularly F2 lowering. Accordingly, if the contrast is phonologically structured as proposed in previous work, its phonetic realization may be better understood in terms of relative fronting versus retraction rather than uniform uvular secondary articulation. These results contribute to discussions of secondary vowel articulations in Qiangic languages. They also highlight the importance of distinguishing between phonological categories and their phonetic realization, and the value of detailed instrumental investigation in refining the articulatory characterization of typologically rare contrasts.