Formant frequencies of vowels in 13 accents of the British Isles

International audienceThis study is a formant-based investigation of the vowels of male speakers in 13 accents of the British Isles. It provides F1/F2 graphs (obtained with a semi-automatic method) which could be used as starting points for more thorough analyses. The article focuses on both phonetic realization and systemic phenomena, and it also provides detailed information on automatic formant measurements. The aim is to obtain an up-to-date picture of within-and between-accent vowel variation in the British Isles. F1/F2 graphs plot z-scored Bark-transformed formant frequencies, and values in Hertz are also provided. Along with the findings, a number of methodological issues are addressed

ROCme! : logiciel pour l'enregistrement et la gestion de corpus oraux

International audienceROCme! has been designed to allow a sensible, autonomous, and dematerialized management of speech recordings. Users can create interfaces for metadata collection thanks to XML tags. Speakers autonomously fill in questionnaires, record, play, and save audio; and browse sentences (or other types of corpora). ROCme! can display text, optionally with HTML formatting, images, sounds, and video.ROCme! permet une gestion rationalisée, autonome et dématérialisée de l’enregistrement de corpus oraux. Il dispose notamment d’une interface pour le recueil de métadonnées sur les locuteurs totalement paramétrable via des balises XML. Les locuteurs peuvent gérer les réponses au questionnaire, l’enregistrement audio, la lecture, la sauvegarde et le défilement des phrases (ou autres types de corpus) en toute autonomie. ROCme! affiche du texte, avec ou sans mise en forme HTML, des images, du son et des vidéos

Effect of implicit training on the processing of morphosyntactic violations by French learners of English.

International audienceImplicit grammar learning with semi-artificial languages has shown that it is possible to learn novel grammatical structures implicitly and that this can lead to both explicit and implicit knowledge. Can these results be extended to natural L2 learning and to learners who already have some knowledge of the L2? In this experiment, we investigated the effect of implicit training on the processing of morphosyntactic violations whose saliency and similarity between the participants’ L1 (French) and L2 (English) varied.The experiment followed a pre-test / training / post-test paradigm. During the pre- and post-test, ERP responses were obtained from 16 participants while they judged the semantic acceptability of 432 sentences. 192 critical polar questions contained violations of past tense morphology with DID and HAD. The rest of the sentences were fillers, 120 of which contained a semantic violations. Participants also completed a short timed Grammaticality Judgment Task with confidence ratings and source attributions (Rebuschat et al. 2015). During 3 one-hour training sessions, participants heard correct polar questions and were asked to select the right answer among propositions containing semantic and critical tense violationsIn the first session, violations with DID elicited a positive peak in the 300-500ms and 500-900 ms windows. A broad negativity resembling an N400 followed violations with HAD. These effects disappeared in the post-test. Behavioural measures revealed that participants were more accurate but slower in the HAD condition. Their performance did not improve following training but their response time slowed down. Confidence ratings showed that performance was better than chance even at a medium-low level of confidence (2 on a scale of 4). Participants reported using mostly intuition but their performance was significantly different from chance only when using rule knowledge. In the semantic acceptability task, participants performed better in the post-test; but they rejected semantically correct sentences containing a morphosyntactic violation with HAD more than with DID. A debriefing questionnaire showed that only 5 participants noticed the critical morphological errors, but only two of them were able to provide explicit rules for the relevant structure. These results show that participants are more sensitive to the L1-like violation (HAD condition) despite the superior saliency of the DID violation. It seems that learners rely on different processes for the two violations – an attention-related response with DID, probably triggered by the phonological saliency of the violation, and actual morphosyntactic processing with HAD. Though no significant effect of session was found on accuracy, the slow-down in response time and the disappearance of the positive effect suggest that participants were starting to rely less on saliency to process violations with DID. The training may have been too short for effects to appear. Although participants show some degree of implicit knowledge, they still relied on explicit knowledge successfully in the GJT. This might be due to the explicit nature of the rest of their English instruction and therefore to a habit of relying on rules.Rebuschat, P. et al., 2015. Triangulating measures of awareness. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 37(Special Issue 02), pp.299–334

Acoustic cues for segmentation resist within speaker variation: An EEG study

In order to recognize spoken words, listeners must map sensory information from the acoustic input onto stored lexical entries. Because the speech signal is continuous, listeners must segment the speech stream in order to recognize words. To accomplish the task of segmentation listeners use their tacit knowledge of a wide range of patterns in their native language including cues from allophonic variation, phonotactic constraints, transitional probabilities, lexical stress etc. Among those cues, there is now a growing body of evidence suggesting that fine-grained acoustic information is available for lexical access and used for segmenting the speech stream. Although it is generally agreed that acoustic cues are used on line to segment the speech signal and to bias lexical access, some important questions remained unanswered. First we ought to know whether these cues are robust enough to be used in the context of multiple productions of the same segmentation as speech is by nature variable and listeners are never exposed to invariant speech. The second important open question is that of the timing of the use of the cues

Perception and comprehension of linguistic and affective prosody in children with Landau-Kleffner syndrome

International audienceThe present study investigated language outcomes in children with Landau-Kleffner syndrome compared with 7 to 8 year-old healthy children and healthy adults. We examined their capacity of understanding simple sentences using linguistic and affective prosodic cues and perceiving them. A battery of prosodic tests was elaborated and used for this study. Results revealed certain delayed language development or a different pattern of performance in participants with Landau-Kleffner syndrome. With more subjects tested in the future results from our battery of prosodic tests would allow us to better understand language development in child and it would be helpful for speech-language therapies

La mie de pain n’est pas une amie: une étude EEG sur la perception de différences infra-phonémiques en situation de variations

International audienceWe examined electrophysiological correlates of listener’s sensitivity to fine acoustic cues in intra-speaker variability conditions in order to test the relevance of such cues for the speech perception system. For this purpose, a modified oddball paradigm has been used with syllables such as French homophones la and l’a, and in a second experiment with longer sequences such as la mie and l’amie, both /lami/. The main result of this study was the observation of a mismatch negativity (MMN) for homophone deviants. Speech perception system is thus sensitive to subphonemic differences between homophone sequences despite the speech variability. Fine acoustic cues are robust enough to play a role in speech processin

Multidimensional signals and analytic flexibility: Estimating degrees of freedom in human speech analyses

Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time. Even greater flexibility is to be expected in fields in which the primary data lend themselves to a variety of possible operationalizations. The multidimensional, temporally extended nature of speech constitutes an ideal testing ground for assessing the variability in analytic approaches, which derives not only from aspects of statistical modeling, but also from decisions regarding the quantification of the measured behavior. In the present study, we gave the same speech production data set to 46 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question, resulting insubstantial variability in reported effect sizes and their interpretation. Using Bayesian meta-analytic tools, we further find little to no evidence that the observed variability can be explained by analysts’ prior beliefs, expertise or the perceived quality of their analyses. In light of this idiosyncratic variability, we recommend that researchers more transparently share details of their analysis, strengthen the link between theoretical construct and quantitative system and calibrate their (un)certainty in their conclusions

Phonetics and Artificial Intelligence: ready for the paradigm shift?

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Deux études phonétiques des aspects suprasegmentaux (F0 et rythme) de la parole d’apprenants francophones de l’anglais

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