Sophie HErment - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Sophie HErment

Research paper thumbnail of Proceedings of the 7th International Conference English Pronunciation: Issues and Practices (EPIP 7)

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 31, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Phonetics or phonology? The case of falling contours in County Galway English

Research paper thumbnail of Voice Quality in English

Le présent numéro traite d'un sujet qui se trouve au centre de la recherche contemporaine : l... more Le présent numéro traite d'un sujet qui se trouve au centre de la recherche contemporaine : la qualité de voix en relation à la langue anglaise, dans une perspective aussi bien liée à la production qu'à la perception. Sont abordés : les implications sociales de la qualité de voix, certains types de qualité de voix (en particulier la creaky voice), la problématique du diagnostic et de la remédiation, les relations avec la sphère émotionnelle des locuteurs, leur genre. Ces phénomènes sont étudiés chez différents locuteurs natifs ou non natifs : locuteurs de l'anglais nord-américain, de l'anglais écossais, apprenants francophones ou locuteurs de L2 d'autres origines. Deux articles concluent ce volume et portent sur l'accent et la graphophonologie, ainsi que sur la misogynie linguistique

Research paper thumbnail of An Exploration of Phonosyntax in Newcastle English

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), May 21, 2015

International audienceno abstrac

Research paper thumbnail of High Rising Terminals in Dublin: forms, functions and gender

Speech Prosody 2022, May 23, 2022

High Rising Terminals, Uptalk, or Upspeak, are stylistic rises that can be found at the end of de... more High Rising Terminals, Uptalk, or Upspeak, are stylistic rises that can be found at the end of declarative statements. They have been studied in numerous varieties of English and in other languages too. It has been shown that these rises can take on different phonetic and phonological forms and convey various pragmatic functions depending on the varieties in which they are found. The present study provides a description of these forms and functions in Dublin (Republic of Ireland). Based on a corpus of 5 speakers from the PAC-Dublin corpus that was recorded in the Irish capital in 2018, the study shows that HRTs are mainly realized with late rises and nuclear rises and that they are different from interrogative and continuative rises, notably because they are steeper than the latter. A sociolinguistic analysis of our corpus also shows that the gender of the speakers has an influence on the occurrence of the phenomenon, which does not seem to be the case for age range. This article thus provides a multidimensional analysis of stylistic rising tones in statements in Dublin.

Research paper thumbnail of How prosody and syntax interact: the case of English it-clefts

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Mar 8, 2017

International audienc

Research paper thumbnail of Périphéries gauche et droite

Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage, Dec 31, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Les positionnements énonciatifs

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 21, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of La voyelle inaccentuée e en position initiale : analyses acoustiques et enjeux pédagogiques pour l'anglais L2

Les travaux sur la réduction vocalique sont nombreux mais les études du inaccentué à l'initia... more Les travaux sur la réduction vocalique sont nombreux mais les études du inaccentué à l'initial de mot sont quasi inexistantes, notamment lorsqu'il s'agit d'étudier des productions d'apprenants francophones. L'étude de cette voyelle est donc ici réalisée sur un corpus d'anglais oral lu par 10 natifs anglophones et 20 apprenants francophones de l'anglais en analysant les valeurs de F1-F2 et de durées. Les résultats révèlent un changement phonologique en cours intéressant pour l'anglais RP contemporain et les données obtenues avec nos trois groupes de locuteurs permettent de comprendre la distribution et la réalisatio n de la voyelle inaccentuée par les natifs et les apprenants de l'anglais. Cette étude nous permet également d'établir des perspectives pédagogiques pour l'apprentissage et l'enseignement de l'anglais L2.

Research paper thumbnail of The Pragmatic Functions of Prosody in English Cleft Sentences

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), May 22, 2012

ABSTRACT The prosodic and pragmatic analysis of some 450 examples of clefts, taken in corpora of ... more ABSTRACT The prosodic and pragmatic analysis of some 450 examples of clefts, taken in corpora of spontaneous and natural speech, sheds light on the different functions that prosody can take on in discourse. The prosodic analysis is mainly based on the number of tone units, the place of the nuclear syllable and the pitch movement. The context is also taken into account. We show that clefts display a variety of prosodic patterns, which can have several pragmatic functions. The role of prosody can be to indicate the information structure of the cleft sentence (a falling tone for informative elements), to annihilate focalisation on the so-called "focus" (the focused element is deaccented) or reinforce it (with a marked tone), or to mark contrast or emphasis on the presupposed element (marked tone or tonicity).

Research paper thumbnail of Making Sense of Nonce Word Stress in English

This chapter presents the findings of an experiment testing native speakers’ intuition about the ... more This chapter presents the findings of an experiment testing native speakers’ intuition about the stress of disyllables. Similar experiments have been carried out for Spanish (Barkanyi, 2002) and for Italian (Kramer, 2009), languages similar to English in that they also display stress patterns conditioned by either phonology (syllable weight, see Hyman, 2003/1985) or morphology (language-specific lexical properties, see Hulst, 1999 or 2011 for a review), and at the same time different in that the English lexicon is much less homogeneous and is clearly split into Germanic and Romance words, two distinctly behaving sets.

Research paper thumbnail of From research to teaching: The case of English rising contours

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2023

It is quite common to hear incongruous rises in the speech of EFL learners, and yet, native Engli... more It is quite common to hear incongruous rises in the speech of EFL learners, and yet, native English speakers produce rising contours in the same contexts. To understand where this discrepancy comes from and how it can be avoided, this paper focuses on the forms and functions of rising contours in English through examples of French learners of English and native English speakers. Depending on the variety of English, the type of speech, the conditions in which the interaction takes place, the relationship between the interlocutors, etc., rises can take different forms and have different functions. On the basis of two studies of native read speech, it is shown that rising contours are rare and that contrary to what is stated in the literature, their main function is not to indicate non-finality and continuation, but rather to convey attitudes. The pedagogical implications of these results are of importance: in read speech, learners should try and avoid rises, even in non-final tone units. In spontaneous speech, learners should be aware of the attitude conveyed by rising terminals. A few examples are given of how the visualisation of prosody can help to better understand the contours and to better hear and produce them.

Research paper thumbnail of La convergence dans les langues

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021

Research paper thumbnail of e> reduction in English: phonological change and pedagogical implications

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), May 21, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Voice Quality in English: an Introduction

Anglophonia, Nov 19, 2019

This 2019 thematic issue of Anglophonia is dedicated to Voice Quality in English. It follows the ... more This 2019 thematic issue of Anglophonia is dedicated to Voice Quality in English. It follows the 19th Villetaneuse Conference on Spoken English, organized by ALOES and PLEIADE at the University of Paris 13 in April 2018, whose topic was Voice quality in English: from the production of a phonation type to the perception of a social variable. Voice quality is a hot topic, it has been the subject of numerous worldwide scientific publications in recent years, even though the initial interest for...

Research paper thumbnail of Intonation in Dublin English: main characteristics and focus on rising tones

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Sep 28, 2017

International audienc

Research paper thumbnail of Construction of the cleft meaning through prosody

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jun 1, 2017

International audienc

Research paper thumbnail of Emphase et variation individuelle dans le débat télévisé : paramètres acoustiques et pragmatico-énonciatifs

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 2, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Constitution et exploitation de corpus oraux: illustration

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jun 9, 2016

Cette communication se penche sur les corpus oraux, leur specificite, leur constitution et leur e... more Cette communication se penche sur les corpus oraux, leur specificite, leur constitution et leur exploitation, en l'illustrant a l'aide d'exemples. Nous presentons egalement plusieurs outils d'annotation et de curation. Nous definissons les corpus oraux et proposons une typologie selon les styles de parole (lue, spontanee…). Puis nous detaillons les differentes phases de la constitution d'un corpus (oral) : a) la reflexion prealable associee a la documentation du corpus (metadonnees) ; b) la collecte et l'annotation a plusieurs niveaux des donnees ; c) la curation qui assure la perennite du corpus et sa mise a disposition. Nous illustrons l'exploitation des corpus oraux par une etude sur le initial inaccentue dans le corpus Aix-Ox, et une autre sur les clivees dans le corpus ICE-GB. Nous montrons le lien entre l'analyse qualitative et le quantitative.

Research paper thumbnail of A heuristic corpus for English word prosody: disyllabic nonce words

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 30, 2013

It is generally admitted that disyllabic words in English are stressed according to their morphol... more It is generally admitted that disyllabic words in English are stressed according to their morphological make-up. While prefixed words show differential behaviour according to major grammatical category, non-derived nouns are allegedly trochaic and underived verbs are either iambic or trochaic following rules of quantity-sensitivity. This paper presents a database which was compiled in order to test native speakers' intuition about the stress of disyllables. 53 nonsense words were created displaying different phonological and morphological structures forced by the spelling. These words were embedded in sentences so that each form appears twice, once as a nominal and once as a verbal form. We recorded 20 speakers reading 106 sentences giving 2120 tokens. The construction of nonce words is the main issue at stake, the paper is therefore concerned with methodological questions regarding the design of a heuristic corpus. The data will be freely available on SLDR for the scientific community.

Research paper thumbnail of Proceedings of the 7th International Conference English Pronunciation: Issues and Practices (EPIP 7)

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 31, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Phonetics or phonology? The case of falling contours in County Galway English

Research paper thumbnail of Voice Quality in English

Le présent numéro traite d'un sujet qui se trouve au centre de la recherche contemporaine : l... more Le présent numéro traite d'un sujet qui se trouve au centre de la recherche contemporaine : la qualité de voix en relation à la langue anglaise, dans une perspective aussi bien liée à la production qu'à la perception. Sont abordés : les implications sociales de la qualité de voix, certains types de qualité de voix (en particulier la creaky voice), la problématique du diagnostic et de la remédiation, les relations avec la sphère émotionnelle des locuteurs, leur genre. Ces phénomènes sont étudiés chez différents locuteurs natifs ou non natifs : locuteurs de l'anglais nord-américain, de l'anglais écossais, apprenants francophones ou locuteurs de L2 d'autres origines. Deux articles concluent ce volume et portent sur l'accent et la graphophonologie, ainsi que sur la misogynie linguistique

Research paper thumbnail of An Exploration of Phonosyntax in Newcastle English

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), May 21, 2015

International audienceno abstrac

Research paper thumbnail of High Rising Terminals in Dublin: forms, functions and gender

Speech Prosody 2022, May 23, 2022

High Rising Terminals, Uptalk, or Upspeak, are stylistic rises that can be found at the end of de... more High Rising Terminals, Uptalk, or Upspeak, are stylistic rises that can be found at the end of declarative statements. They have been studied in numerous varieties of English and in other languages too. It has been shown that these rises can take on different phonetic and phonological forms and convey various pragmatic functions depending on the varieties in which they are found. The present study provides a description of these forms and functions in Dublin (Republic of Ireland). Based on a corpus of 5 speakers from the PAC-Dublin corpus that was recorded in the Irish capital in 2018, the study shows that HRTs are mainly realized with late rises and nuclear rises and that they are different from interrogative and continuative rises, notably because they are steeper than the latter. A sociolinguistic analysis of our corpus also shows that the gender of the speakers has an influence on the occurrence of the phenomenon, which does not seem to be the case for age range. This article thus provides a multidimensional analysis of stylistic rising tones in statements in Dublin.

Research paper thumbnail of How prosody and syntax interact: the case of English it-clefts

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Mar 8, 2017

International audienc

Research paper thumbnail of Périphéries gauche et droite

Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage, Dec 31, 2022

Research paper thumbnail of Les positionnements énonciatifs

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 21, 2021

Research paper thumbnail of La voyelle inaccentuée e en position initiale : analyses acoustiques et enjeux pédagogiques pour l'anglais L2

Les travaux sur la réduction vocalique sont nombreux mais les études du inaccentué à l'initia... more Les travaux sur la réduction vocalique sont nombreux mais les études du inaccentué à l'initial de mot sont quasi inexistantes, notamment lorsqu'il s'agit d'étudier des productions d'apprenants francophones. L'étude de cette voyelle est donc ici réalisée sur un corpus d'anglais oral lu par 10 natifs anglophones et 20 apprenants francophones de l'anglais en analysant les valeurs de F1-F2 et de durées. Les résultats révèlent un changement phonologique en cours intéressant pour l'anglais RP contemporain et les données obtenues avec nos trois groupes de locuteurs permettent de comprendre la distribution et la réalisatio n de la voyelle inaccentuée par les natifs et les apprenants de l'anglais. Cette étude nous permet également d'établir des perspectives pédagogiques pour l'apprentissage et l'enseignement de l'anglais L2.

Research paper thumbnail of The Pragmatic Functions of Prosody in English Cleft Sentences

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), May 22, 2012

ABSTRACT The prosodic and pragmatic analysis of some 450 examples of clefts, taken in corpora of ... more ABSTRACT The prosodic and pragmatic analysis of some 450 examples of clefts, taken in corpora of spontaneous and natural speech, sheds light on the different functions that prosody can take on in discourse. The prosodic analysis is mainly based on the number of tone units, the place of the nuclear syllable and the pitch movement. The context is also taken into account. We show that clefts display a variety of prosodic patterns, which can have several pragmatic functions. The role of prosody can be to indicate the information structure of the cleft sentence (a falling tone for informative elements), to annihilate focalisation on the so-called "focus" (the focused element is deaccented) or reinforce it (with a marked tone), or to mark contrast or emphasis on the presupposed element (marked tone or tonicity).

Research paper thumbnail of Making Sense of Nonce Word Stress in English

This chapter presents the findings of an experiment testing native speakers’ intuition about the ... more This chapter presents the findings of an experiment testing native speakers’ intuition about the stress of disyllables. Similar experiments have been carried out for Spanish (Barkanyi, 2002) and for Italian (Kramer, 2009), languages similar to English in that they also display stress patterns conditioned by either phonology (syllable weight, see Hyman, 2003/1985) or morphology (language-specific lexical properties, see Hulst, 1999 or 2011 for a review), and at the same time different in that the English lexicon is much less homogeneous and is clearly split into Germanic and Romance words, two distinctly behaving sets.

Research paper thumbnail of From research to teaching: The case of English rising contours

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2023

It is quite common to hear incongruous rises in the speech of EFL learners, and yet, native Engli... more It is quite common to hear incongruous rises in the speech of EFL learners, and yet, native English speakers produce rising contours in the same contexts. To understand where this discrepancy comes from and how it can be avoided, this paper focuses on the forms and functions of rising contours in English through examples of French learners of English and native English speakers. Depending on the variety of English, the type of speech, the conditions in which the interaction takes place, the relationship between the interlocutors, etc., rises can take different forms and have different functions. On the basis of two studies of native read speech, it is shown that rising contours are rare and that contrary to what is stated in the literature, their main function is not to indicate non-finality and continuation, but rather to convey attitudes. The pedagogical implications of these results are of importance: in read speech, learners should try and avoid rises, even in non-final tone units. In spontaneous speech, learners should be aware of the attitude conveyed by rising terminals. A few examples are given of how the visualisation of prosody can help to better understand the contours and to better hear and produce them.

Research paper thumbnail of La convergence dans les langues

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2021

Research paper thumbnail of e> reduction in English: phonological change and pedagogical implications

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), May 21, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of Voice Quality in English: an Introduction

Anglophonia, Nov 19, 2019

This 2019 thematic issue of Anglophonia is dedicated to Voice Quality in English. It follows the ... more This 2019 thematic issue of Anglophonia is dedicated to Voice Quality in English. It follows the 19th Villetaneuse Conference on Spoken English, organized by ALOES and PLEIADE at the University of Paris 13 in April 2018, whose topic was Voice quality in English: from the production of a phonation type to the perception of a social variable. Voice quality is a hot topic, it has been the subject of numerous worldwide scientific publications in recent years, even though the initial interest for...

Research paper thumbnail of Intonation in Dublin English: main characteristics and focus on rising tones

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Sep 28, 2017

International audienc

Research paper thumbnail of Construction of the cleft meaning through prosody

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jun 1, 2017

International audienc

Research paper thumbnail of Emphase et variation individuelle dans le débat télévisé : paramètres acoustiques et pragmatico-énonciatifs

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Apr 2, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of Constitution et exploitation de corpus oraux: illustration

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jun 9, 2016

Cette communication se penche sur les corpus oraux, leur specificite, leur constitution et leur e... more Cette communication se penche sur les corpus oraux, leur specificite, leur constitution et leur exploitation, en l'illustrant a l'aide d'exemples. Nous presentons egalement plusieurs outils d'annotation et de curation. Nous definissons les corpus oraux et proposons une typologie selon les styles de parole (lue, spontanee…). Puis nous detaillons les differentes phases de la constitution d'un corpus (oral) : a) la reflexion prealable associee a la documentation du corpus (metadonnees) ; b) la collecte et l'annotation a plusieurs niveaux des donnees ; c) la curation qui assure la perennite du corpus et sa mise a disposition. Nous illustrons l'exploitation des corpus oraux par une etude sur le initial inaccentue dans le corpus Aix-Ox, et une autre sur les clivees dans le corpus ICE-GB. Nous montrons le lien entre l'analyse qualitative et le quantitative.

Research paper thumbnail of A heuristic corpus for English word prosody: disyllabic nonce words

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 30, 2013

It is generally admitted that disyllabic words in English are stressed according to their morphol... more It is generally admitted that disyllabic words in English are stressed according to their morphological make-up. While prefixed words show differential behaviour according to major grammatical category, non-derived nouns are allegedly trochaic and underived verbs are either iambic or trochaic following rules of quantity-sensitivity. This paper presents a database which was compiled in order to test native speakers' intuition about the stress of disyllables. 53 nonsense words were created displaying different phonological and morphological structures forced by the spelling. These words were embedded in sentences so that each form appears twice, once as a nominal and once as a verbal form. We recorded 20 speakers reading 106 sentences giving 2120 tokens. The construction of nonce words is the main issue at stake, the paper is therefore concerned with methodological questions regarding the design of a heuristic corpus. The data will be freely available on SLDR for the scientific community.