Catégorie d'événements : SRPP

Domain-initial strengthening refers to variation in the phonetic properties of consonants and vowels when occurring after a prosodic boundary and according to the strength of this boundary (the stronger the boundary, the stronger the strengthening). This strengthening results in a spatial expansion of articulatory movements and the enhancement of (some of) the segment’s contrastive acoustic properties (see [1], [2]). Concomitant changes in timing have also been reported for strengthened segments. Although lengthening of domain-initial segments has not been found to be systematic, especially in French [2, 3], overlap between consonants in #CC clusters (with “#” representing a prosodic boundary) tends to decrease with increased boundary strength [4, 5]. A recent study on French V-to-V coarticulation in #V1CV2 sequences also showed a reduced anticipatory coarticulation of V2 on V1 when it is initial in a strong prosodic domain [6]. In the present study we test for a change in C-to-V coarticulation in French according to the prosodic position of the sequence (IP initial vs. word medial) and we look at different types of coarticulation varying in terms of cohesiveness by comparing : carryover coarticulation in CV sequences (where the overlap between segments is rather stable) and anticipatory coarticulation VC sequences (more variable and possibly more affected by other factors, as prosodic position).

About 17,000 vowels extracted from two large corpora (ESTER [7] and NCCFr [8]) of natural speech are studied. These includes /i, e, a, ɔ/ in uvular /R/ vs. coronal /t, d, s, z, n, l/ contexts in VC sequences. CV sequences in the same uvular vs. coronal contexts could also been observed for /a/ (but not for the other vowels due to insufficient number of cases). C-to-V coarticulation is compared between sequences that are either initial in an Intonational Phrase (IPi) or medial in a word (Wm). In Wm position, the opposite context (left in VC and right in CV) is a labial consonant. While in the CV sequence, C and V are always tautosyllabic, we could not control for the syllabic affiliation of C in the VC cases. Coarticulation is measured as the difference in F1 and F2 according to consonantal context. Analysis is performed using a linear mixed model in R [9] and the package lme4 [10].

Results show a clear effect of consonantal context in both VC and CV structures : as expected, F1 is significantly lower and F2 higher in coronal context than in uvular context. Prosodic position affects both F1 and F2 dimensions in a vowel-dependent way. When in IPi position, /a/ has a higher F1 (and F2 in VC only), /e/ has a lower F1 and a higher F2, /i/ has a higher F2, while no change is found for /ɔ/. More interestingly, our study reveals an interaction between the prosodic position and consonantal context. For all vowels in VC sequences, and for both F1 and F2, the effect of consonantal context is smaller in IPi position than in Wm position. This illustrated in Figure 1 for /aC/ and /eC/. In CV, the effect of consonantal context also interacts with prosodic position, although difference between prosodic positions is subtler.

This study based on a large amount of data produced in a naturalistic context shows that vowels in strong prosodic positions are less coarticulated, i.e. less overlapped by surrounding consonants, in French. These results will be discussed according to the proposed domain of activation of a π-gesture responsible of the slowing down of articulatory gestures near phrase boundaries. Overall, this reduced overlap undergone by prosodic domain initial vowels, and vowels in domain initial syllables, provides further support to the view that initial strengthening contributes to the preservation of segmental identity.

[1] Cho, T. 2011. Laboratory phonology. The continuum companion to phonology, 343-368.

[2] Georgeton, L., & Fougeron, C. 2014. Domain-initial strengthening on French vowels and phonological contrasts : evidence from lip articulation and spectral variation. Journal of Phonetics, 44, 83-95.

[3] Keating, P., Cho, T., Fougeron, C., & Hsu, C. 2003. Domain-initial articulatory strengthening in four languages. Laboratory Phonology, 6, 143–161.

[4] Bombien, L., Mooshammer, C., Hoole, P., Rathcke, T., & Kühnert, B. 2007. Articulatory strengthening in initial German /kl/ clusters under prosodic variation. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences XVI, (Saarbrücken), 457–460.

[5] Byrd, D., & Choi, S. 2010. At the juncture of prosody, phonology, and phonetics—The interaction of phrasal and syllable structure in shaping the timing of consonant gestures. Laboratory Phonology, 10, 31–59.

[6] Turco, G., Fougeron, C., & Audibert, N. 2016. The effects of prosody on French V-to-V coarticulation : A corpus-based study. Proceedings of Interspeech, (San Francisco), 998-1001.

[7] Gravier, G., Bonastre, J-F., Geoffrois, E., Galliano, S., Tait, K. Mc., & Choukri, K. 2006. Corpus description of the ESTER evaluation campaign for the rich transcription of French broadcast news. Proceedings of European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, 139–142.

[8] Torreira, F., Adda-Decker, M., & Ernestus, M. 2010. The Nijmegen corpus of casual French. Speech Communication, 52, 201–212.

[9] R Development Core Team. 2008. R : A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria. ISBN 3-900051-07-0, URL http://www.R- project.org/.

[10] Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. 2015. Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1-48.

Language archives are becoming increasingly available, allowing new possibilities for phonetic analysis, especially for under-researched and endangered languages. While a few languages have had many of their phonetic patterns described, most languages have scarcely been described at all. Many of the world’s most typologically unusual contrasts or phonological patterns have been reported in languages with small numbers of speakers and that consequently have not received attention from academic researchers. To gain a greater understanding of the phonetic patterns present in human languages and to better inform phonetic and phonological theory, data from under-resourced and endangered languages and language communities is crucial. Archives allow the efficient use of resources by making acoustic records available, but the decisions made in the creation and curation of archives affect what analyses are possible, based on the level of detail in the analysis accompanying the sound files. In this talk, I will describe some currently existing language archives, focusing on those that contain data primarily from endangered languages. I will summarize a selection of the papers that have performed phonetic analysis on data from those archives and close with some recommendations for archives that would make phonetic analysis more feasible and that would also provide greater reward for depositors of this valuable material.

Languages differ in the way consonants and vowels are parsed into syllables. For a CCV sequence, either they allow for complex onsets, with a homosyllabic CCV parse (e.g. as in American English), or they allow for simple onsets only, resulting in a heterosyllabic C.CV parse (e.g. as in Moroccan Arabic), where the first consonant does not belong to the syllable onset. In a cross-linguistic overview of different syllable coordination patterns in languages such as American English, Romanian, Polish, Italian, Moroccan Arabic and Tashlhiyt Berber I will discuss the relation of qualitative syllable parses and their quantitative outcome from a dynamical perspective.

This internal timing of consonantal clusters is systematically affected by natural variation in a given language such as prosodic variation and segmental composition. But how much variability is tolerated in a phonological system ? In a computer simulation, we aim to capture the degree of variability of syllable patterns allowed in Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish. It will be shown that these two languages do not only differ in their phonological syllable parse, but also in the degree of variability they allow for.

However, after a certain amount of variability a phonological pattern can break down. This will be shown by comparing syllable timing in typical and atypical speech. We recorded Essential Tremor patients that have a chronic deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the nucleus ventralis intermedius (VIM). Results reveal a timing deficit in the syllable production of the patients. Conflicting demands of complex timing patterns cannot be produced anymore, and the realisation of the phonological constituent breaks down.

Ce séminaire constitue une introduction aux systèmes dynamiques et leur application en phonologie.

Depuis plusieurs années, le phénomène de nivellement dialectal intéresse les sociolinguistes travaillant sur les variétés d’anglais en Grande-Bretagne, notamment celles du nord de l’Angleterre. Si la disparition progressive des traditional dialects a eu pour conséquence une diminution du nombre de variétés parlées sur le territoire, les dynamiques linguistiques qui existent actuellement dans le nord de l’Angleterre entraîneraient une divergence, au moins au niveau phonologique, par rapport aux variétés du sud. À partir de la fin des années 1990, des travaux ont permis de mettre au jour la diffusion de variantes supralocales, non-limitées à une ville ou à une région données, mais qui restent cependant clairement identifiables comme étant nordiques. L’importance des facteurs attitudinaux a été mise en avant dans ces travaux : les locuteurs adoptent ces variantes supralocales afin de ne pas trahir leur origine géographique, tout en gardant une identité nordique. La diffusion de ces variantes aurait pour conséquence un nivellement dialectal, soit une homogénéisation des variétés dans le nord de l’Angleterre.
Nous proposons une discussion du phénomène du nivellement dans le Greater Manchester, à partir d’une étude phonético-acoustique du corpus PAC-LVTI Manchester. Nous traiterons notamment des variantes supralocales, ainsi que de celles qui sont, plus généralement, caractéristiques du nord de l’Angleterre : présence d’une opposition foot / strut, présence de diphtongues ou de monophtongues pour face et goat. Nous soulignerons en particulier l’importance des facteurs attitudinaux pour le nivellement, et verrons que s’il existe effectivement des exemples de ce phénomène dans la variété mancunienne, la situation ne semble pas se résumer à une simple opposition entre variétés septentrionales et méridionales.

The goal of this presentation is to investigate Malayalam affricates articulation by some Malayalam speakers of the Southern variety. Static (direct) palatography and linguogrqphy methods are used for our articulatory data.

Part of an on-going research on Malayalam affricates, we are presenting preliminary results from three speakers. We wanted to determine whether different laryngeal types such as voiced, voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated affricates [dʒ tʃh tʃ] share the same place of articulation (we did not find any example of voiced aspirated affricates). We equally wanted to determine whether there was any co-articulation effect while producing affricates in three different vocalic contexts, i.e. /i/, /a/ and /u/.
Contrary to the general claim which defines Malayalam affricates as palatal, i.e. posterior, our speakers produced all studied consonants systematically more anterior, mostly around the alveolar region. No palatal productions were observed during our experiment.

It is common practice in sociophonetics to measure vowel formants at one (monophthongs) or – for diphthongs ­­– two time points, the so-called target approach. It should be noted that even diphthongs are often measured at one time-point. First, I will present a study of regional vowel variation in Standard Dutch and compare the target approach with two dynamic approaches for investigating regional patterns of variation (Van der Harst, Van de Velde & Van Hout 2014) . Second, I will show some preliminary results of the first phonetic studies of (West-)Frisian, revealing dynamic aspects of long vowels that have not been observed before in phonetic and phonological studies of Frisian (Sloos, Van de Velde & Demolin, fc). Third, I will present a beta version of Visible Vowels (Heeringa & Van de Velde, fc), an internet tool for the plotting and normalization of vowels and the analysis of variation patterns in vowel systems, incorporating the dynamic aspects of vowels.

La parole sifflée est un registre de parole adapté de la parole modale qui est utilisée dans des contextes où la voix est moins appropriée (dégradation par propagation acoustique, masquage dans le bruit ambiant naturel, …). Différentes langues du monde l’ont développée de manière alternative à la voix criée afin de dialoguer à distance. Des « langues sifflées » sont ainsi observables sur tous les continents habités de la planète. Ce registre naturel de parole est susceptible d’apporter de nombreux renseignements sur l’information nécessaire et suffisante à la communication linguistique, sur les possibilités d’adaptation naturelle du signal de parole et sur les implications perceptives de telles transformations. Après une introduction générale, ce séminaire proposera une analyse des derniers résultats obtenus sur la perception de la parole sifflée, en particulier par des sujets n’ayant jamais entendu parler de ce phénomène.

Human talkers decode spoken language with unconscious ease, even in noisy environments where engineering approaches to speech recognition fall short. A crucial reason for this success is the ability to integrate sensory cues from multiple sources. This talk will provide an overview of how visual and somatosensory channels augment auditory processes in speech perception, with particular emphasis on recent work showing how appropriately timed somatosensory perturbations (facial skin deformation, aero-tactile stimulation) can lead to systematic shifts in perceived perceptual boundaries.

Dans ce séminaire, je rapporterai les résultats d’une expérience de la perception de “can” et “can’t” dans divers types d’anglais (principalement américain et britannique). Je comparerai les résultats obtenus des locuteurs natifs japonais, français et chinois. En général, les auditeurs français ont identifié le contraste mieux que les auditeurs japonais et chinois, et les auditeurs chinois l’ont identifié mieux que les auditeurs japonais. Les différences parmi les types des phrases indiquent des tendances d’erreurs communes et différentes pour chaque L1. Il s’agit de discuter des raisons de ces différences, et montrer par la suite les résultats d’une expérience de l’entraînement de la perception de “can” et “can’t” par des apprenants japonais d’anglais.