How do French humorists manage their persona across situations? A corpus study on their prosodic variation

Objective: This empirical corpus study presents an analysis of stylistic variation on the temporal, pitch and stress level of eight French humorists’ speech in four different speaking contexts (conversation, radio interview, radio show and live comedy show). It reveals which prosodic features comedians use to adapt their speech to a specific audience and communicative situation. With this, it enquires whether specific prosodic cues allow distinguishing between variations in phonogenres (shared representation of an oral practice) and phonostyles (acoustic style characteristic of an individual, social group or situation task) (Simon et al. 2010:72). Data & Method: The two-hour corpus consists of 24 samples from eight French comedians in four speaking contexts. The data was treated with Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2012) and processed with several tools. Segmentation and phonetic alignment were done with EasyAlign (Goldman 2008) while prosodic profiles of the samples were extracted using Prosogram (Mertens 2004). Syllable stress and categorization were done using Prosoprom (Goldman 2009) and additional Perl scripts. Inspired by previous research on communicative behavior and their variation through situational and contextual determiners (Koch & Osterreicher 2001:586), the corpus structure allows to correlate the humorists’ performance over three different axes: professional vs. non-professional speaking style, everyday private vs. public broadcasted situation and spontaneous vs. prepared speech. Hypothesis: The study is drawing upon H&H theory according to which a speaker adapts his discourse production depending on the communicative and situational requirements (Lindblom 1990). The first hypothesis claims that public and prepared situations (radio and comedy shows) will incline speakers to produce discourse with (1) higher articulation ratio and speech rate (temporal features), (2) melodic excitation marked by a wide speech range (due to expressivity) but (3) fewer hesitations marks (filled pauses and lengthening). Secondly, we hypothesized that less experienced comedians will show more variety/adaptability in their performances than experts, as there is a conflation between show-persona and life-persona for the latter (Astésano 1999:293-294; Fónagy & Fónagy 1976). The hypotheses of the study are twofold: between situation tasks and between speakers. Results & Discussion: Corpus data confirm a decreasing continuum of hyper-articulation from prepared and radio situations to spontaneous and face-to-face ones. During shows and on the radio, this hyper-articulation serves as a strategy of proximity between the actor/presenter arising from a necessary effort to counterbalance the lack of shared contextual knowledge between the speakers: if the comedian fails at communicating the pun, the legitimacy of his practice could be questioned; if the radio host doesn’t manage to formulate a clear message, the radio audience won’t have (at least directly) the chance to ask for additional information. Prosodic variation of humorist speech has a pragmatic and epistemological value as it carries an “identifying function” for the speaker (identity control in regard to a given genre) and the listeners (information and perception of the speaker’s singular identity) (Attardo et al. 2011:196; Goldman et al. 2009:221). References Astésano, C. (1999). Rythme et Accentuation en Français : Invariance et Variabilité Stylistique. Doctoral Thesis. Paris, France: L’Harmattan. Attardo, S., Wagner, M. M., & Urios-Aparisi, E. (2011). Prosody and humor. Pragmatics & Cognition, 19(2), 189–201. doi:10.1075/pc.19.2.01att Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2014). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.3.80. Retrieved from http://www.praat.org Fónagy, I., & Fónagy, J. (1976). Prosodie professionnelle et changements prosodiques. Le Français Moderne, 44(3), 193–228. Goldman, J., Auchlin, A., & Simon, A. C. (2009). Discrimination de styles de parole par analyse prosodique semi-automatique. Actes de l’Interface Discourse Prosodie, IDP 2009, Paris, 9-11 Septembre 2009, 207–221. Goldman, J., Avanzi, M., Auchlin, A., & Simon, A. C. (2012). Proceedings Chapter A Continuous Prominence Score Based on Acoustic Features A Continuous Prominence Score Based on Acoustic Features. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2012, 13th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, 9-13 september 2012. Koch, P., & W., O. (2001). Langage parlé et langage écrit. Lexikon Der Romanistischen Linguistik, 1/2, 584–627. Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining Phonetic Variation: a Sketch of the H and H theory. In Hardcastle, W.J., Marchal 1. (Eds), Speech Production and Speech Modelling, Kluwer Academic Publishers, NATO ASI Series, Dordrecht, 403-439. Mertens, Piet (2004) The Prosogram: Semi-Automatic Transcription of Prosody based on a Tonal Perception Model. in B. Bel & I. Marlien (eds.) Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004, Nara (Japan), 23-26 March. (ISBN 2-9518233-1-2) Simon, A. C., Auchlin, A., Avanzi, M., & Goldman, J.-P. (2010). Les phonostyles : une description prosodique des styles de parole en français. In M. Abecassis & G. Ledegen (Eds.), Les voix des Français. En parlant, en écrivant vol. 2 (Vol. 2, pp. 71–88). Berne: Peter Lang

How do French humorists adapt across situations? A corpus study of their prosodic and (dis)fluency profiles

The paradigm of humor studies has deemed prosody (rhythm and intonation) and (dis)fluencies (discourse markers, filled and unfilled pauses, repetitions, etc.) as relevant cues in conversational humor for expression of sarcasm and irony. However, they also make valuable (interactive) devices for discourse planning and structure since they carry both semantic and pragmatic information. After a summary on the study of humorists’ speech and its meta-pragmatic implications (Sections 1 & 2), a two-fold corpus-based analysis offers results on 8 humorists’ speech variations across 4 situations (theatre and radio sketches, radio and face-to-face interviews) and their relevant contextual features. Firstly on the continuum from hypo- to hyper-articulation (Lindblom, 1990), temporal and melodic variations reveal which discourse adaptation is motivated by a specific pragmatic determiner. Secondly, (dis)fluencies’ distribution within speakers and across situations reveal the importance of the individual’s Speaker Dis/Fluency Profile (SDFP). Discussion shall focus on the study’s contribution to humorists’ phonostyles and persona, as well as on the implication of native language SDFP for assessment of non-native speaker

Dynamics of disfluencies within Basic Discourse Units

Les marques locales de disfluences (répétitions, reformulations, amorces,pauses pleines et silencieuses) participent à la segmentation du flux discursif au sein d’unités syntaxiques et prosodiques. Les points d’interruption du flux verbal, inhérents à la structure des disfluences, constituent un indice précis d’un possible écart de la fluence. L’analyse sur corpus des points d’interruption (frontières droites du reparandum) au sein de six situations de parole révèle que leur distribution est associée aux types d’unités de segmentation du discours. Elle est notamment corrélée à la présence de frontières syntactico-prosodiques non congruentes ou au caractère atypique du type d’unité discursive au sein du genre. Keywords: disfluencies, interruption point, discourse unit, spoken Frenc

Évaluation contextuelle de la (dis)fluence en production et perception : pratiques communicatives et formes prosodico‐syntaxiques en français

The objective of this thesis is to study the effects of (dis)fluencies on the production and perception of speech by French native speakers. The ease at which we produce, perceive and interpret spoken language depends on various linguistic, situational and social factors. Hence, the way one defines "fluency" or "disfluency" itself depends on which type of context is taken into account, and more precisely, on what kind of expectations one draws from this context. (Dis)fluencies are linguistic devices such as silent and filled pauses, vocalic lengthening, lexical repetitions or discourse markers (e.g. well, you know, I mean). The main hypothesis of this research is that not all (dis)fluencies are equal and that some of them may participate in the evaluation of fluency. Hence, their ambivalent status can either support or hinder the production and perception of speech in interaction. These analyses specifically target the definition of linguistic, situational and social expectations of disfluencies and discourse structure, by observing the variability and homogeneity of discourses across various situations. The method combines statistical and quantitative analyses of annotated corpora and perception experiments. Each chapter is devoted to one phenomenon (silent pauses, filled pauses, lengthening and repetitions). Linguistic or contextual disfluency is considered when there is a mismatch between expectations and the produced/perceived content in context, potentially creating discursive rupture.(LALE - Langues et lettres) -- UCL, 201

Variations phonostylistiques et patrons de bipolarisations rythmiques. Etude sur corpus : la parole des humoristes français. Thèse de master soutenue en vue de l'obtention d'un Diplôme de Master en Linguistique.

Ce mémoire en prosodie rend compte des variations phonostylistiques (temporelles, mélodiques et accentuelles) d'un échantillon de deux heures de parole de huit humoristes français dans quatre situations de parole (conversation en face à face, conversation radiophonique, chronique radiophonique et scène humoristique). La structure du corpus permet d'établir des croisements entre voix professionnelles et non professionnelles, situations médiatiques et non médiatiques ainsi que discours spontanés et préparés. Au regard des variations phonostylistiques globales, cette étude se focalise sur la variation distributionnelle et acoustique d'un patron rythmique particulier. Ce dernier implique au moins une proéminence initiale et finale aux frontières d'unités lexicales simples ou composées. Cette bipolarisation, connue sous le nom d'"arc accentuel", est testée sous l'angle de la linguistique de corpus dans une perspective perceptivo-acoustique. Nous réalisons une annotation graduelle et une nouvelle catégorisation multi-niveaux des proéminences établies sur la position de la proéminence dans le mot simple et composé ainsi que dans le groupe intonatif. Notre étude révèle ainsi l'intérêt relatif de croisements multiples dans la catégorisation accentuelle et l'analyse des variations rythmiques des objets de la prosodie postlexicale. Directrice de mémoire : Anne Catherine SimonThis Master’s thesis in prosody presents an analysis of stylistic variation on the temporal, pitch and stress level, based on a two-hour long spoken corpus. The corpus consists of samples from eight French comedians in four speaking contexts (conversation, radio interview, radio show, and live comedy show). The corpus’ structure allows us to correlate their performance over three different axes: professional vs. non-professional speaking style, everyday vs. public (broadcast) situation, and spontaneous vs. prepared speech. Drawing upon global speaking style profiles, we focus on the distributional and acoustic properties of one specific rhythmic pattern, the accentual arc. This pattern comprises of at least two prominent syllables, one initial and one final, found at the boundaries of simple or compound words. We study the phenomenon of accent polarisation linking the corpus linguistic perspective with the acoustic properties and perceptive correlates of the speech signal. Prominent syllables are assigned a gradual score; we then propose a novel categorisation of prominence combining the position of these syllables inside simple and compound words, with their position in the intonation group. Our thesis shows the importance of integrating multiple levels of analysis when classifying accentual patterns and studying rhythmic variation, for the purposes of post-lexical prosody studie

Combining Corpus and Experimental Methods: Towards a Cognitively and Socially Integrated Definition of Fluency

Abstract Recent advances in linguistics suggest the benefit of combining empirical data from corpus-driven and experimental methods to access higher understanding of the cognitive process underlying the production and perception of phenomena (Arppe et al. 2010). Along these lines, this contribution introduces the different folds of my thesis subject on the production and perception of prosodic markers of (dis)fluency by native speakers of French. I will be presenting (1) a cognitively integrated and usage-based approach to (dis)fluency for native speakers (Segalowitz 2010; Alter & Oppenheimer 2009; Moniz 2009 2014), (2) a brief outline of the conclusions drawn from my latest corpus study on disfluencies across situations and Basic Discourse Units (Grosman 2013 ; Degand, Martin & Simon 2014) and from the perceptive experiment on identical word repetitions (Grosman submitted) and finally (3) I would enjoy a brain-storming on our next experimental design relating to cognitive and social syntactico-prosodic fluency across situations elaborated in collaboration with A.C Simon and L. Degand. References Alter, A. L., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2009). Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation. Personality and Social Psychology Review : An Official Journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc, 13(3), 219–35. Arppe, A., Gilquin, G., Glynn, D., Hilpert, M., & Zeschel, A. (2010). Cognitive Corpus Linguistics: five points of debate on current theory and methodology. Corpora, 5(1), 1–27. Degand, L., Martin, L. J., & Simon, A.-C. (2014). LOCAS-F : un corpus oral multigenres annoté. In E. Sciences (Ed.), CMLF 2014 - 4ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2014. Berlin, Allemagne. Grosman, I. (2013). Dynamics of disfluencies within Basic Discourse Units. Nouveaux Cahiers de Linguistique Française, 31, 45-50. Moniz, H., Trancoso, I., & Mata, A. I. (2009). Classification of disfluent phenomena as fluent communicative devices in specific prosodic contexts. In B. Schuller, S. Steidl, & A. Batliner (Eds.), Proceeding of Interspeech 2009, 6-10 september 2009, 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (pp. 1719–1722). Brighton, United Kingdom: ISCA Archive. Moniz, H., Batista, F., Mata, A. I., & Trancoso, I. (2014). Speaking style effects in the production of disfluencies. Speech Communication, 65(May), 20–35. Segalowitz, N. (2010). Cognitive Bases of Second Language Fluency. New York: Routledge

Comparing Online and Offline Methodologies for Spoken Corpus Annotation. The case of Filled Pauses and Hesitation-Related Lengthening in French

In this contribution we compare the results of two methodologies for annotating phenomena related to hesitation in speech (e.g. Martin & Strange, 1968), namely filled pauses and lengthening. The first method is the off-line annotation of a spoken corpus by annotators who have access to additional information (e.g. a visual representation of the signal) and the possibility to listen multiple times to segments; most manual annotations in speech corpora are produced using this methodology. The second method is using software that allows for the online annotation of a phenomenon in real-time, without the possibility of stopping the playback or repeatedly listening to segments. In both cases, annotators were “experts” (they had training and experience in phonetics and prosody); we can envisage using the second methodology with “naïve” listeners (participants in an annotation campaign not having prior knowledge of the underlying research question). We also compare these two methodologies with the results of automatic annotation, which is based on statistical models trained on a different speech corpus. These comparisons are a form of triangulation, i.e. “cross-checking data from multiple sources to search for regularities in the research data” (O’Donoghue and Punch, 2003). Methodology All annotations were performed on the LOCAS-F corpus (Degand et al., 2014) which is a balanced corpus of spoken French with samples of 14 different speaking styles (discourse genres). The duration of the corpus is 3.5 hours and it contains 43.000 tokens. The corpus is aligned at the phone level (manually verified) and also contains an expert prosodic annotation (two levels of boundaries and four prosodic contours) as well as a part-of-speech and syntactical annotation. The transcription conventions used in the corpus readily identify autonomous filled pauses, and allow us to identify syllables ending in schwa (possibly perceived as epenthetic). With respect to off-line annotation methods, we used two different sets of data: the entire corpus has been annotated by the second and third authors, independently from one another, and using different annotation schemes. Both annotation protocols, however, include markers for filled pauses and for hesitation-related lengthening at the syllable level. With respect to the on-line annotation method, we used the Tapping Annotator software (previously used to study the perception of prosodic boundaries, cf. Simon & Christodoulides, 2016). A simple interface (Figure 1) allows the user to listen to corpus audio samples and press a key as soon as they perceive the phenomenon under study. All keystrokes (press and release times) are recorded for analysis. The first author used this interface to annotate the entire LOCAS-F corpus, in non-contiguous sessions of six corpus samples; she repeated the process twice. Analysis The annotation campaigns described above result in four datasets (two offline and two online). In the case of on-line annotation, we used a simple method to correlate a keypress to the syllables that triggered the perception of a hesitation (based in the average reaction time of the annotator to pure tones). An additional dataset was the result of an automatic detection of hesitation-related lengthening using the statistical models of the DisMo annotator (Christodoulides & Avanzi, 2015). We will present a comparison of the five datasets, along with an analysis of the correlates of syllables that triggered the perception of hesitation. These correlates include syllable duration, intonation contour, presence and duration of a subsequent silent pause, local speech rate, position within token and within syntactic constituent. References Christodoulides, G. & Avanzi, M. (2015). Automatic detection and annotation of disfluencies in spoken French corpora”, Proc. of the 16th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), September 6–10, Dresden, Germany, pp. 1849–1853. Degand, L., Martin, L.J., Simon, A.C. (2014). Unités discursives de base et leur périphérie gauche dans LOCAS-F, un corpus oral multigenres annoté. Actes du 4ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française 2014, Berlin, Germany: EDP Sciences. Martin, J. G. & Strange, W. (1968). The perception of hesitation in spontaneous speech, Perception & Psychophysics, 3(6): 427-438, DOI: 10.3758/BF03205750 O’Donoghue, T. & Punch K. (2003). Qualitative Educational Research in Action: Doing and Reflecting, Routledge, p.78. Simon, A. C. & Christodoulides, G. (2016). Perception of Prosodic Boundaries by Naïve Listeners in French, Proc. of Speech Prosody 2016, 31 May – 3 June 2016, Boston, USA

Studying Prosodic (dis)fluency Markers in French

Ce travail a été présenté au Poster Day de l'Institut Langage et Communication (IL&C). Il présente le sujet de recherche de la thèse, l'état du corpus et résume une étude de cas sur la distribution des marques de disfluences au sein d'unités syntactico-prosodiques

Perception des hésitations : liens entre accord inter-annotateurs et contextes prosodiques

Les allongements et pauses pleines représentent 1.9 à 7.6 % du flux verbal et sont reconnus comme des caractéristiques inhérentes des productions discursives (Eklund, 2010 ; Foxtree, 1995). En production, ils reflètent divers processus discursifs et cognitifs tels que la planification, la recherche de mots ou la mise en saillance d’une nouvelles entité (Arnold, 2010 ; Bortfeld et al., 2001 ; Fraundorf & Watson, 2008 ; Schmitter-Edgecombe, Vesneski, & Jones, 2000). Ces marqueurs peuvent présenter des distributions et patrons de cooccurrences réguliers : les pauses pleines et allongements sont préférentiellement suivis par des pauses silencieuses (Goldman et al, 2001 ; Moniz et al. 2008). Selon ces auteurs, les allongements seraient causés par un retardement de la production discursive. En perception, les marqueurs occasionnent par ailleurs des attentes et interprétations chez les interlocuteurs – e.g. l’anticipation d’un nouvel élément discursif (Barr, 2010 ; Brennan et Williams, 1995 ; Cole et al., 2005). De fait, les interlocuteurs jugent plus disfluents les segments de parole contenant des hésitations sans pause silencieuse subséquente (Moniz et al., 2009). Toutefois, à notre connaissance, peu d’études ont examiné si la perception même des hésitations est univoque et si celle-ci est influencée par la présence d’hésitations environnantes. L’expérience perceptive d’annotation proposée tente de répondre à ces questions. Six enregistrements de LOCAS-F (Louvain Corpus of Annotated Speech – French, Degand, Martin & Simon, 2014) et du corpus de thèse de Rousier-Vercruyssen (projet FNS n°140269, Fossard et al., en prep.) d’une durée totale de 12 minutes (3266 syll.) ont été annotés sous Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2009) par trois linguistes francophones. Quatre catégories sont à l’étude : syllabe non-disfluente, syllabe porteuse d’un allongement dit d’hésitation, syllabe représentant une pause pleine (schwa post-tonique, euh isolé, mais également hum et mh), ainsi que le reparandum de quatre autres marques de (dis)fluences (répétitions, amorces, auto-corrections, insertions). Les résultats indiquent un fort taux d’accord inter-annotateurs (Kappa Fleiss = 0.71, p syllabes non disfluentes (κ =0.75) > allongements d’hésitation (κ =0.63) > reparandum des autres marques de (dis)fluences (κ =0.43). Références Arnold, J. E. (2010). How speakers refer: the role of accessibility. Language and linguistics Compass, 4, 187-203. Barr, D. J. (2010). The role of fillers in listeners attributions for speaker disfluency. Language and cognitive processes, 25 (4), 441-455. Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2009). Praat: doing phonetics by computer (version 5.1.05) [computer program]. Bortfeld, H., Leon, S. D., Bloom, J. E., Schober, M. F., & Brennan, S. E. (2001). Disfluency rates in conversation: Effects of age, relationship, topic, role, and gender. Language and speech, 44 (2), 123-147. Brennan, S. E., & Williams, M. (1995). The feeling of another’s knowing: Prosody and filled pause as cues to listeners about the metacognitive state of speakers. Journal of memory and language, 34, 383-398. Cole, J., Hasegawa-Johnson, M., Shih, C., Kim, H., Lee, E.-K., Lu, H.-Y. Mo, Y. & Yoon, T.-J. (2005). Prosodic parallelism as a cue to repetition disfluency. In Proceedings of Diss05, disfluency in spontaneous speech workshop. Duez, Danielle. 2001a. Acoustic-phonetic characteristics of filled pauses in spontaneous French speech: preliminary results. Proceedings of Workshop Disfluencies (ISCA), 41–44. Edinburg, UK. Eklund, R. & M. Wirén. 2010. Effects of open and directed prompts on filled pauses and utterance production. In: Proceedings of Fonetik 2010, Lund University, 23–28. Fossard, M., Achim, A. M., Rousier-Vercruyssen, L., Gonzalez, S. & Champagne-Lavau, M. (en prep.). Discourse construction through the modulation of referential markers in a collaborative storytelling in sequence task. Fox Tree, J. E. F. (1995). Fox Tree_1995_The effects of False Starts and Repetitions on the Processing of Subsequent Words in Spontaneous Speech.pdf. Fraundorf, S. H. & Watson, D. G. (2008). Dimensions of Variation in Disfluency Production in Discourse. In Proceedings of LONDIAL. Martin, Laurence J., Liesbeth Degand & Anne-Catherine Simon. 2014. Forme et fonction de la périphérie gauche dans un corpus oral multigenres annoté. Corpus(13). 243–265. (5 May, 2015). Moniz, Helena, Ana Isabel Mata, Isabel Trancoso & Céu Viana. 2008. How can you use disfluencies and still sound as a good speaker? INTERSPEECH, 1687. Moniz, Helena, Isabel Trancoso & Ana Isabel Mata. 2009. Classification of disfluent phenomena as fluent communicative devices in specific prosodic contexts. Proceedings of Interspeech 2009, 1719–1722. Brighton, UK. Goldman, J.; Avanzi, M. & Auchlin, A. (2010). Hesitations in read vs. spontaneous French in a multi-genre corpus. In Proceedings of DiSS-LPSS Joint Workshop 2010, 101-102. Schmitter-Edgecombe, M.; Vesneski, M. & Jones, D. (2000). Aging and Word-Finding: A Comparison of Spontaneous and Constrained Naming Tests. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 15, 479-493

Variation de la durée des pauses silencieuses : Impact de la syntaxe, du style de parole et des disfluences

Dans cette contribution, nous cherchons à rendre compte de la fréquence et de la durée des pauses silencieuses en fonction de leur localisation dans la chaîne parlée, de leur combinaison avec d’autres disfluences et de la situation de parole dans laquelle elles sont produites. À partir de l’analyse de 4 845 pauses silencieuses extraites d’un corpus (durée 3 h 38 min) représentant 14 situations de parole contrastées, nous montrons que la localisation syntaxique des pauses est le facteur qui explique le mieux leur durée et que cette corrélation est renforcée dans les situations de parole préparées ou médiatiques. Nous proposons aussi une réflexion approfondie sur l’opportunité d’utiliser des seuils de durée (inférieurs ou supérieurs) pour exclure certaines pauses de l’analyse et sur les manières de représenter les durées des pauses pour tenir compte du fait qu’elles ne suivent pas une distribution normale.The study aims to uncover the relation between frequency and duration of silent pauses, their interaction with syntax and with disfluencies, and their variation in different spoken registers. The analysis of 4 845 silent pauses retrieved from a multi-genre corpus (duration 3 h 38 min) demonstrates that syntactic position is the strongest predictor of silent pause duration. This correlation is stronger in prepared and broadcasted speech. We discuss the use of duration thresholds for filtering out silent pauses and we also suggest alternative ways to represent pause duration when pauses are not normally distributed