Top-down effects on compensation for coarticulation are not replicable

Listeners use lexical knowledge to judge what speech sounds they heard. I investigated whether such lexical influences are truly top-down or just reflect a merging of perceptual and lexical constraints. This is achieved by testing whether the lexically determined identity of a phone exerts the appropriate context effects on surrounding phones. The current investigations focuses on compensation for coarticulation in vowel-fricative sequences, where the presence of a rounded vowel (/y/ rather than /i/) leads fricatives to be perceived as /s/ rather than /∫/. This results was consistently found in all three experiments. A vowel was also more likely to be perceived as rounded /y/ if that lead listeners to be perceive words rather than nonwords (Dutch: meny, English id. vs. meni nonword). This lexical influence on the perception of the vowel had, however, no consistent influence on the perception of following fricative.peer-reviewe

A methodology for the automatic detection of perceived prominent syllables in spoken French

Prosodic transcription of spoken corpora relies mainly on the identification of perceived prominence. However, the manual annotation of prominent phenomena is extremely timeconsuming, and varies greatly from one expert to another. Automating this procedure would be of great importance. In this study, we present the first results of a methodology aiming at an automatic detection of prominence syllables. It is based on 1. a spontaneous French corpus that has been manually annotated according to a strict methodology and 2. some acoustic prosodic parameters, shown to be corpusindependent, that are used to detect prominent syllables. Some automatic tools, used to handle large corpora, are also described