Combien d'accents en français? Focus sur la France, la Belgique et la Suisse

Two experiments are reported, an accent identification test and a survey aiming at mapping pronunciation variants in European French. The results of the first experiment show that French varieties spoken in Quebec and Paris (supposed to represent the norm) are identified best, before the Maghrebian accent. In Europe, southern accents are rather well distinguished from northern French, Belgian and Swiss accents. In the second experiment, which focuses on the quality of mid vowels and the pronunciation of final consonants, a clear North-South divide is shown. The pronunciation of some words also distinguishes Belgian and Swiss accents. Despite a certain discrepancy between production and perception, we hypothesise that 8 accents may be considered in European French: North, East, West, South-East and South-West of France, Corsica, Belgium and Switzerland

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

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

Enregistrements et transcriptions pour un atlas sonore des langues régionales de France

L’objectif est de montrer et de valoriser la diversité linguistique de la France, à travers des enregistrements recueillis sur le terrain, une réalisation informatique (qui permet de visualiser les aires dialectales) et un travail de transcription orthographique (qui représente un objet de recherche en soi). Il y a ainsi une dimension à la fois scientifique et patrimoniale à ce travail, dans la mesure où un certain nombre de langues régionales ou minoritaires sont en situation critique.The aim of this paper is to show and promote the linguistic diversity of France, through field recordings, a computer achievement (which allows us to visualise dialectal areas) and an orthographic transcription work (which represents an object of research in itself). There is thus both a scientific dimension and a heritage dimension in this work, insofar as a number of regional or minority languages are in a critical situation

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

Listeners use temporal information to identify French- and English-accented speech

Which acoustic cues can be used by listeners to identify speakers’ linguistic origins in foreign-accented speech? We investigated accent identification performance in signal-manipulated speech, where (a) Swiss German listeners heard native German speech to which we transplanted segment durations of French-accented German and English-accented German, and (b) Swiss German listeners heard 6-band noise-vocoded French-accented and English-accented German speech to which we transplanted native German segment durations. Therefore, the foreign accent cues in the stimuli consisted of only temporal information (in a) and only strongly degraded spectral information (in b). Findings suggest that listeners were able to identify the linguistic origin of French and English speakers in their foreign-accented German speech based on temporal features alone, as well as based on strongly degraded spectral features alone. When comparing these results to previous research, we found an additive trend of temporal and spectral cues: identification performance tended to be higher when both cues were present in the signal. Acoustic measures of temporal variability could not easily explain the perceptual results. However, listeners were drawn towards some of the native German segmental cues in condition (a), which biased responses towards ‘French’ when stimuli featured uvular /r/s and towards ‘English’ when they contained vocalized /r/s or lacked /r/

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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

Les voyelles moyennes en français des Outre-mer et dans les créoles

International audienc

Les voyelles moyennes en français des Outre-mer et dans les créoles

International audienc