The Perceptual Effect of L1 Prosody Transplantation on L2 Speech: The Case of French Accented German

Research has shown that language learners are not only challenged by segmental differences between their native language (L1) and the second language (L2). They also have problems with the correct production of suprasegmental structures, like phone/syllable duration and the realization of pitch. These difficulties often lead to a perceptible foreign accent. This study investigates the influence of prosody transplantation on foreign accent ratings. Syllable duration and pitch contour were transferred from utterances of a male and female German native speaker to utterances of ten French native speakers speaking German. Acoustic measurements show that French learners spoke with a significantly lower speaking rate. As expected, results of a perception experiment judging the accentedness of 1) German native utterances, 2) unmanipulated and 3) manipulated utterances of French learners of German suggest that the transplantation of the prosodic features syllable duration and pitch leads to a decrease in accentedness rating. These findings confirm results found in similar studies investigating prosody transplantation with different L1 and L2 and provide a beneficial technique for (computer-assisted) pronunciation training

When perception isn't reality: Accent identification and perceptual dialectology in French

© 2006 Cambridge University PressThis article examines levelling and diversity in northern urban French pronunciation through the optic of folk (= non-linguists') perceptions of variation. These perceptions are investigated by the identification of authentic voice samples (rather than other instruments widely used in perceptual dialectology such as mental mapping): respondents from the Pays de la Loire region of north-western France heard extracts of scripted speech from Nancy and Rennes, and were asked to identify the speakers' regional background and say whether they were of urban or rural origin. The results of this test show that while some difference between the two speaker location groups was accurately perceived, the informants also formed some inaccurate judgements, partly based on social stereotypes. Overall there is some confirmation of accent levelling, and of general social psychological tendencies such as stereotyping, annexation and time-lag in perceptions of regional–social linguistic variation

Evaluating the pronunciation of proper names by four French grapheme-to-phoneme converters

International Speech Communication Association (Isca) - International Astronautical Federation.ISBN : 13 9781604234480.This article reports on the results of a cooperative evaluation of grapheme-to-phoneme (GP) conversion for proper names in French. This work was carried out within the framework of a general evaluation campaign of various speech and language processing devices, including text-to-speech synthesis. The corpus and the methodology are described. The results of 4 systems are analysed: with 12-20% word error rates on a list of 8,000 proper names, they give a fairly accurate picture of the progress achieved, the state-of-the-art and the problems still to be solved, in the domain of GP conversion in French. In addition, the resources and collected data will be made available to the scientific and industrial community, in order to be re-used in future bench-marks

In search of cues discriminating West-african accents in French

International audienceThis study investigates to what extent West-African French accents can be distinguished, based on recordings made in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal. First, a perceptual experiment was conducted, suggesting that these accents are well identified by West-African listeners (especially the Senegal and Ivory Coast accents). Second, prosodic and segmental cues were studied by using speech processing methods such as automatic phoneme alignment. Results show that the Senegal accent (with a tendency toward word-initial stress followed by a falling pitch movement) and the Ivory Coast accent (with a tendency to delete/vocalise the /R/ consonant) are most distinct from standard French and among the West-African accents under investigation

Corsican French questions: is there a prosodic transfer from Corsican to French and how to highlight it?

Poster, 4 pagesInternational audienceThis study investigates whether a prosodic transfer can be highlighted from Corsican (an Italo-Romance language) to French spoken in Corsica, where French is now the dominant language. A corpus of transparent sentences such as la touriste trouve la caserne (French) or a turista trova a caserna (Corsican) was designed and the productions of bilingual speakers, recorded in Corsica, were compared with the French counterparts of Parisian reference speakers. The melody of yes/no questions turns out to contrast Corsican and Corsican French (both with high tones followed by final pitch falls) and standard French (with utterance-final high tones). The former pattern can be interpreted as a prosodic transfer from Corsican to French. Various methods are considered to validate this hypothesis and an experimental paradigm is proposed. Index Terms: prosody in contact, questions, Corsican accent in French, endangered languagesCette étude examine si un transfert prosodique peut être mis en évidence du Corse (une langue Italo-romane) au français parlé en Corse, où le français est maintenant la langue dominante. Un corpus de phrases simples comme touriste la trouve la caserne (français) ou a turista trova a caserna (corse) a été conçu et les productions des locuteurs bilingues, enregistré en Corse, ont été comparé aux homologues françaises de locuteurs de référence Parisiens. La mélodie des yes/no questions s'avèrent contraster le français de corse et le corse (tous deux avec de hauts tons suivis par des chutes de pic final) alors que le français standard connait des pics finaux hauts. Le contour mélogique peut être interprété comme un transfert prosodique du Corse au français. On considère diverses méthodes pour valider cette hypothèse et on propose un paradigme expérimental

An acoustic-perceptual approach to the prosody of Chinese and native speakers of Italian based on yes/no questions

The present study investigates the prosody of yes/no questions (in comparison with statements) in Chinese learners and native speakers of Italian. Acoustic analyses and a perceptual test were performed, in order to identify the main trends in non-native productions. Results show the relevance of prosody, which differentiates elementary, intermediate and advanced Chinese learners of Italian. Listening tests based on prosody transplantation also suggest that non-native segments with a native Italian prosody are rated as less accented than are native Italian segments with a non-native prosody. Similar trends were found, overall, in terms of question/assertion discrimination, confirming the relative importance of prosody. These findings could be helpful for teachers and learners of Italian as a foreign language

How speaker tongue and name source language affect the automatic recognition of spoken names

In this paper the automatic recognition of person names and geographical names uttered by native and non-native speakers is examined in an experimental set-up. The major aim was to raise our understanding of how well and under which circumstances previously proposed methods of multilingual pronunciation modeling and multilingual acoustic modeling contribute to a better name recognition in a cross-lingual context. To come to a meaningful interpretation of results we have categorized each language according to the amount of exposure a native speaker is expected to have had to this language. After having interpreted our results we have also tried to find an answer to the question of how much further improvement one might be able to attain with a more advanced pronunciation modeling technique which we plan to develop

Acoustic aspects of vowel harmony in French

International audienceThis paper examines acoustic aspects of vowel harmony (VH), understood as regressive vowel-to-vowel assimilation, in two regional varieties of French in six speakers' productions of 107 disyllabic word pairs. In each word pair, the word-initial vowel (V1) was phonemically either /e/ or /o/, and the word-final stressed vowel (V2) alternated between /e-E/, /ø-oe/, /o-O/ or /i-a/. Results are consistent with the idea that VH in French entails variations in tongue height along with related displacements of the tongue position along the front-back axis. These effects were independent of both the number of morphemes and lexical frequency. They were more systematic in Northern than in Southern French speakers' speech. Linear mixed-effects models strongly suggest that VH is a gradient effect of the trigger on the harmonizing vowel. Results lend support to usage-based phonological approaches regarding gradient phonetic differences as part of the gestural scores that make up the lexicon and that can be variably grammaticalized in different varieties of the language

From dilation to coarticulation: is there vowel harmony in French?

International audienceThis paper presents the preliminary results of an acoustic study, and a review of previous work on vowel harmony in French. It shows that harmony, initially regarded as regular sound change, is considered an optional constraint on the distribution of mid vowels. Acoustic evidence of anticipatory assimilation of pretonic mid vowels to tonic high and low vowels is shown in three speakers' readings of disyllabic words in two dialects. It is argued that vowel-to-vowel assimilation referred to as vowel harmony does exist in French, and likely to extend beyond morphological contexts in which it was previously thought to operate

Acoustic aspects of vowel harmony in French

International audienceThis paper examines acoustic aspects of vowel harmony (VH), understood as regressive vowel-to-vowel assimilation, in two regional varieties of French in six speakers' productions of 107 disyllabic word pairs. In each word pair, the word-initial vowel (V1) was phonemically either /e/ or /o/, and the word-final stressed vowel (V2) alternated between /e-E/, /ø-oe/, /o-O/ or /i-a/. Results are consistent with the idea that VH in French entails variations in tongue height along with related displacements of the tongue position along the front-back axis. These effects were independent of both the number of morphemes and lexical frequency. They were more systematic in Northern than in Southern French speakers' speech. Linear mixed-effects models strongly suggest that VH is a gradient effect of the trigger on the harmonizing vowel. Results lend support to usage-based phonological approaches regarding gradient phonetic differences as part of the gestural scores that make up the lexicon and that can be variably grammaticalized in different varieties of the language