Paolo Mairano - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Paolo Mairano
Online tools for phonetic transcription training
L'évaluation de la prononciation dans une L2 : peut-on ne pas se référer à un modèle de L1 ?
Does gemination resist linguistic attrition? A pilot study on Italian migrant speech in Melbourne Australia
Effetti dell’ortografia sulla percezione di una lingua seconda: gli apprendenti italofoni si aspettano consonanti geminate in francese L2?
Expected patterns and divergence in the acquisition of the /s/ ~ /z/ contrast in L2 English
Studio sul grado di geminazione in un corpus di emigrati italiani in Australia
We present a speech rhythm analysis workflow based on two different but complementary methodologi... more We present a speech rhythm analysis workflow based on two different but complementary methodologies: one at a segmental/syllabic level, and another one at a suprasegmental/prosodic level. This bimodal methodology is devised to study the effects of regular and irregular rhythmic priming -i.e. rhythmic stimuli presented to speakers before elocution -on the speech rhythm of people with Parkinson's disease. Preliminary results show that both segmental and suprasegmental rhythm metrics vary in different priming conditions. We propose that this methodology can be used to have a better grasp of speech rhythm by peering into the potential interaction or correlation between vocalic-consonantal interval distributions and pitch movement variations. Future implementations of the workflow are possible in other speech analysis fields if models are shown to be effective.
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific r... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
In this study, we explore the possible effect of linguistic attrition on consonant gemination amo... more In this study, we explore the possible effect of linguistic attrition on consonant gemination among speakers of Italian living in Australia. We analyse a corpus of spontaneous speech for a group of native Italian speakers who emigrated to Melbourne in Australia between the 1950s and 1970s. Given gemination is a fully lexicalised and stable phenomenon in Italian but not in English, we investigate whether, after many years of living in Australia, the phonological contrast between singleton and geminate consonants in Italian is preserved, or undergoes phonetic shift due to longterm contact with English. An analysis of acoustic durations reveals that all participants produced a significant difference in singleton and geminate consonant length, albeit with variable lengthening ratios. A post-hoc qualitative analysis seems to point to shorter geminate durations for speakers who have lived longer in Australia, but this will need to be supported by further research.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 31, 2022
Preparing a text for publication requires the attentive, eagle-eyed efforts of numerous people, s... more Preparing a text for publication requires the attentive, eagle-eyed efforts of numerous people, starting with the authors. We thank them all profusely for trusting us with their work. It was a true leap of faith to send us a text, with the vague promise of an online publication that would have a DOI. We hope the final result meets your expectations. Reviewers have also played a critical role in bringing these Proceedings to life, ensuring double-blind peer-reviews. They brought much more than just another pair of eyes and their intellectual openness; they also freely contributed their specific expertise -sometimes dropping other work to engage in back-and-forth discussions about possible solutions, potential exceptions. The following colleagues worked extremely hard to bring out the best in each text:
ItalianoLinguaDue , 2017
INTRODUZIONE Possono le coppie minime facilitare l"apprendimento della pronuncia dell"italiano L2... more INTRODUZIONE Possono le coppie minime facilitare l"apprendimento della pronuncia dell"italiano L2/LS? In questo articolo si presenta un nuovo strumento di ricerca per le coppie minime, il Minimal Pair Finder (MPF), a partire dal quale sono state proposte delle attività di scoperta, sensibilizzazione e riflessione sull"uso e sulla pronuncia di [m] e [m:] sia all"interno di parola sia all"interno di frase. Le trascrizioni delle conversazioni svolte con gli apprendenti sinofoni durante le attività di riflessione e i risultati di un breve questionario di valutazione suggeriscono che lavorare sugli aspetti fonetico-fonologici rappresenti un valore aggiunto nella didattica dell"italiano L2/LS: questo tipo di attività sembra in effetti sensibilizzare gli apprendenti alle difficoltà percettive e produttive delle coppie minime e li motiva nell"apprendimento conducendoli gradualmente ad un percorso di autocorrezione (Costamagna, 2010; Calabrò, 2015) 3 2. IL MINIMAL PAIR FINDER: COS"È E A COSA SERVE 2.1. Coppie minime Minimal Pair Finder (MPF) è uno strumento disponibile online (all"indirizzo http://phonetictools.altervista.org/minimalpairfinder/) per l"estrazione di coppie minime e semi-minime. Una coppia minima è una coppia di parole che contengono gli stessi fonemi, eccetto uno: per esempio, "male" e "mare" contengono i suoni [ma.e], ma si oppongono perché la prima contiene [l] e la seconda contiene [r]. Le coppie minime sono state usate sin dagli inizi della fonologia (Trubetzkoy, 1939) per provare che determinati suoni possono essere considerati fonemi di una lingua. Nell"esempio sopra, la coppia minima male-mare dimostra che i suoni [l] e [r] sono in grado di creare parole diverse in italiano e pertanto fanno parte dell"inventario fonemico di tale lingua. Le coppie minime possono essere sfruttate nell"insegnamento della pronuncia L2, soprattutto per illustrare contrasti fonologici inesistenti nella L1 dell"apprendente. Per esempio, nel caso dell"italiano L2, può essere proficuo mostrare coppie minime che
Language and Speech, Sep 23, 2019
It is often claimed that patterns of gemination are different across varieties of Italian. In par... more It is often claimed that patterns of gemination are different across varieties of Italian. In particular, northern speakers are sometimes said to degeminate, or to produce shorter geminates than central and southern speakers. However, experimental data proving such claims is largely missing. In this article, we perform an analysis of the CLIPS corpus with the aim of comparing gemination for northern versus central and southern speakers of Italian. The analysis of different data types (target words in isolated position, read sentences, dialogues, local radio and TV broadcasts) revealed that: (a) geminate consonants are produced by all speakers, incl. northern speakers; (b) differences in the magnitude of consonant lengthening are small (< 19 ms) and reach significance only for some data types; (c) the shortening of vowels preceding geminate consonants is mainly restricted to isolated target words in nuclear position, with no significant differences between northern and central/ southern speakers. We argue that regional differences in Italian gemination have been overestimated and overemphasized in the literature. In fact, the evidence suggests that they are not as sizeable as previously thought, probably because of the progressive standardization of the language.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 29, 2022
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jun 21, 2021
Proceedings of the 14th EURALEX International Congress, 2010
We shall explain how different pronunciation variants were selected for inclusion in the dictiona... more We shall explain how different pronunciation variants were selected for inclusion in the dictionary and how the transcriptions of anglicisms had to be adapted to the phonology and phonetics of Italian. A discussion will follow about the effects caused by the juxtaposition of English and Italian transcriptions. In fact, because of the intereference of the two phonetic and phonological systems, traditional conventions were in some cases abandoned in favour of more accurate phonetic transcriptions: this has been done with the aim of illustrating the most remarkable differences between the pronunciation of the words by Italian and English speakers.
This paper is intended to discuss aspects of durational variability of V-to-V intervals in Italia... more This paper is intended to discuss aspects of durational variability of V-to-V intervals in Italian from a phonetically based perspective. Recently, the interest in the phonetic properties underlying rhythm typologies has been growing, also as a consequence of the repeatedly observed weakness of phonological factors in the explanation of rhythmic differences. Timing is only one of the many aspects contributing to language rhythm. The speaker and the text are fundamental sources of variation, in the sense that rhythm depends far more on individual timing strategies than on the phonological structure of a language.
Applying durational metrics to recorded speech vs. TTS
ABSTRACT The present study is motivated by the observation that TTS samples of concatenative synt... more ABSTRACT The present study is motivated by the observation that TTS samples of concatenative synthesis may often sound as a-rhythmic to the human ear. For this reason, we aimed at comparing samples of speech from real speakers (studio recordings) vs. synthetic samples. We followed a fairly complicated procedure in order to obtain comparable samples, including several steps. First, we selected 2000 recorded sentences of (each) English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese from bigger speech corpora (1 speaker per language). Then, we further divided them into (a) 1500 sentences to be included in the speech-base of the TTS system, and (b) 500 sentences for test. The former 1500 sentences were used to create TTS voices (for each of the six languages), with which we synthesized the latter 500 sentences. We thereby obtained 500 sentences in two flavours, i.e. as recorded samples and as TTS samples. These were all automatically segmented starting from the text, which was itself phonetically transcribed by our in-house software. The result of the transcription and segmentation was then converted to C and V intervals by an ad-hoc script and imported to R for analysis. Pearson's correlation coefficient was calculated for each segment of recorded speech vs. TTS samples. Results show that correlation is high overall (ranging from 0.82 to 0.93 for the six speaker-TTS pairs) and prove that concatenative synthesis is able to reproduce global durational characteristics of speech. Values for the most popular rhythm metrics (deltas, %V, PVIs, CCIs) were also computed and plotted to charts to illustrate durational variability for the samples. Results for recorded samples of the six languages studied here reflect previous results reported in the literature: English and German samples tend to show greater durational variability than French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese; and they tend to have lower vocalic percentage. Results for TTS samples also show the very same trend. In fact, the mean values for each TTS system tends to sit very close to its recorded speech counterpart. Also, it is remarkable that no general trend was found to connect TTS samples with their recorded speech counterpart: that is to say, TTS samples may sometimes show (slightly) more or (slightly) less durational variability of C and V segments: there does not seem to be a general tendency in our data in this respect. We claim that traditional rhythm correlates are global measures that account for average durational variability of speech samples. They are good at giving a general overview of the rhythmic/timing properties of speech, but they are not able to detect specific local a-rhythmical phenomena found in TTS output, which are probably rooted in the prosodic pattern of the sentence. In the future, it would be desirable to develop acoustic indices that are able to detect such phenomena.
Voice assimilation of morphemic -s in the L2 English of L1 French, L1 Italian and L1 Spanish learners
Anglophonia, Dec 20, 2020
Cette etude examine la regle d'assimilation progressive de voisement du -s morphemique final ... more Cette etude examine la regle d'assimilation progressive de voisement du -s morphemique final en anglais L2. Nous avons analyse les donnees du corpus IPCE-IPAC de productions orales d'apprenants en mesurant la periodicite de toutes les realisations du -s morphemique et nous avons compare trois groupes de locuteurs : 15 francophones natifs, 15 italophones natifs et 10 hispanophones natifs. En nous appuyant sur les distributions et sur le statut phonologique de [s] et [z] dans les L1 des apprenants, ainsi que sur le SLM (Speech Learning Model) et la MDH (Markedness Differential Hypothesis), nous avons emis l'hypothese que les locuteurs francophones et italophones natifs seraient capables de reproduire la regle d'assimilation de voisement de l'anglais plus facilement que les apprenants hispanophones natifs. Nos predictions ne sont que partiellement confirmees par les resultats obtenus : les apprenants francophones natifs (dont la L1 presente /s/ et /z/ en qualite de phonemes en position finale) reussissent effectivement mieux a reproduire les schemas de periodicite. Cependant, les hispanophones natifs reproduisent la regle de voisement de maniere plus fidele que les italophones natifs. Nous comparons ces resultats avec notre etude precedente sur /s/ et /z/ non-morphemiques par les memes locuteurs et nous les discutons en relation avec la marque de ces deux sons. Nous proposons que l’opposition de voix entre /s/ ~ /z/ pourrait constituer une exception a la hierarchie de la marque pour les contrastes de voix des consonnes obstruantes (debut de mot < milieu de mot < fin de mot), ou la position finale de mot ne se revele pas plus marquee que les autres. De plus, les resultats de nos deux etudes revelent des differences de voisement concernant les sibilantes morphemiques et non-morphemiques dans les productions d’anglais L2 (comme pour l’anglais L1). Cela pourrait avoir des repercussions sur les modeles d’acquisition de la phonologie des langues secondes, car ces modeles ne prennent actuellement pas en compte une interaction entre les sons d’une L2 et leur statut morphologique.
Falling Yes/No Questions in Corsican French and Corsican: Evidence for a Prosodic Transfer
Prosody, phonology and phonetics, 2015
To distinguish between questions and statements, the use of high pitch has been claimed to prevai... more To distinguish between questions and statements, the use of high pitch has been claimed to prevail cross-linguistically. However, the implementation of the high pitch feature may differ across languages and dialects. Terminal rises for questions are probably the most widespread (and French is no exception), but initial high tones and final falls may also be observed in the French variety spoken in Corsica as well as in the Corsican language. This chapter investigates to what extent these patterns can be measured, perceived and interpreted as a prosodic transfer from Corsican to Corsican French. A corpus of transparent sentences (i.e. similar, easily intercomprehensible 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. Two perception experiments were conducted. The first one, using delexicalisation, focused on the comparison between Corsican, Corsican French and Parisian French question prosodies: it revealed a significant bias of Corsican French question prosody towards Corsican prosody. The second experiment focused on question/statement discrimination: it showed, in particular, that Corsican French questions are often misidentified as statements by Parisian listeners but accurately identified by Corsican listeners. Several (socio)linguistic hypotheses are finally put forth to account for these results.
Scienza multilingue per ispanofoni
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 31, 2009
Online tools for phonetic transcription training
L'évaluation de la prononciation dans une L2 : peut-on ne pas se référer à un modèle de L1 ?
Does gemination resist linguistic attrition? A pilot study on Italian migrant speech in Melbourne Australia
Effetti dell’ortografia sulla percezione di una lingua seconda: gli apprendenti italofoni si aspettano consonanti geminate in francese L2?
Expected patterns and divergence in the acquisition of the /s/ ~ /z/ contrast in L2 English
Studio sul grado di geminazione in un corpus di emigrati italiani in Australia
We present a speech rhythm analysis workflow based on two different but complementary methodologi... more We present a speech rhythm analysis workflow based on two different but complementary methodologies: one at a segmental/syllabic level, and another one at a suprasegmental/prosodic level. This bimodal methodology is devised to study the effects of regular and irregular rhythmic priming -i.e. rhythmic stimuli presented to speakers before elocution -on the speech rhythm of people with Parkinson's disease. Preliminary results show that both segmental and suprasegmental rhythm metrics vary in different priming conditions. We propose that this methodology can be used to have a better grasp of speech rhythm by peering into the potential interaction or correlation between vocalic-consonantal interval distributions and pitch movement variations. Future implementations of the workflow are possible in other speech analysis fields if models are shown to be effective.
HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific r... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
In this study, we explore the possible effect of linguistic attrition on consonant gemination amo... more In this study, we explore the possible effect of linguistic attrition on consonant gemination among speakers of Italian living in Australia. We analyse a corpus of spontaneous speech for a group of native Italian speakers who emigrated to Melbourne in Australia between the 1950s and 1970s. Given gemination is a fully lexicalised and stable phenomenon in Italian but not in English, we investigate whether, after many years of living in Australia, the phonological contrast between singleton and geminate consonants in Italian is preserved, or undergoes phonetic shift due to longterm contact with English. An analysis of acoustic durations reveals that all participants produced a significant difference in singleton and geminate consonant length, albeit with variable lengthening ratios. A post-hoc qualitative analysis seems to point to shorter geminate durations for speakers who have lived longer in Australia, but this will need to be supported by further research.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 31, 2022
Preparing a text for publication requires the attentive, eagle-eyed efforts of numerous people, s... more Preparing a text for publication requires the attentive, eagle-eyed efforts of numerous people, starting with the authors. We thank them all profusely for trusting us with their work. It was a true leap of faith to send us a text, with the vague promise of an online publication that would have a DOI. We hope the final result meets your expectations. Reviewers have also played a critical role in bringing these Proceedings to life, ensuring double-blind peer-reviews. They brought much more than just another pair of eyes and their intellectual openness; they also freely contributed their specific expertise -sometimes dropping other work to engage in back-and-forth discussions about possible solutions, potential exceptions. The following colleagues worked extremely hard to bring out the best in each text:
ItalianoLinguaDue , 2017
INTRODUZIONE Possono le coppie minime facilitare l"apprendimento della pronuncia dell"italiano L2... more INTRODUZIONE Possono le coppie minime facilitare l"apprendimento della pronuncia dell"italiano L2/LS? In questo articolo si presenta un nuovo strumento di ricerca per le coppie minime, il Minimal Pair Finder (MPF), a partire dal quale sono state proposte delle attività di scoperta, sensibilizzazione e riflessione sull"uso e sulla pronuncia di [m] e [m:] sia all"interno di parola sia all"interno di frase. Le trascrizioni delle conversazioni svolte con gli apprendenti sinofoni durante le attività di riflessione e i risultati di un breve questionario di valutazione suggeriscono che lavorare sugli aspetti fonetico-fonologici rappresenti un valore aggiunto nella didattica dell"italiano L2/LS: questo tipo di attività sembra in effetti sensibilizzare gli apprendenti alle difficoltà percettive e produttive delle coppie minime e li motiva nell"apprendimento conducendoli gradualmente ad un percorso di autocorrezione (Costamagna, 2010; Calabrò, 2015) 3 2. IL MINIMAL PAIR FINDER: COS"È E A COSA SERVE 2.1. Coppie minime Minimal Pair Finder (MPF) è uno strumento disponibile online (all"indirizzo http://phonetictools.altervista.org/minimalpairfinder/) per l"estrazione di coppie minime e semi-minime. Una coppia minima è una coppia di parole che contengono gli stessi fonemi, eccetto uno: per esempio, "male" e "mare" contengono i suoni [ma.e], ma si oppongono perché la prima contiene [l] e la seconda contiene [r]. Le coppie minime sono state usate sin dagli inizi della fonologia (Trubetzkoy, 1939) per provare che determinati suoni possono essere considerati fonemi di una lingua. Nell"esempio sopra, la coppia minima male-mare dimostra che i suoni [l] e [r] sono in grado di creare parole diverse in italiano e pertanto fanno parte dell"inventario fonemico di tale lingua. Le coppie minime possono essere sfruttate nell"insegnamento della pronuncia L2, soprattutto per illustrare contrasti fonologici inesistenti nella L1 dell"apprendente. Per esempio, nel caso dell"italiano L2, può essere proficuo mostrare coppie minime che
Language and Speech, Sep 23, 2019
It is often claimed that patterns of gemination are different across varieties of Italian. In par... more It is often claimed that patterns of gemination are different across varieties of Italian. In particular, northern speakers are sometimes said to degeminate, or to produce shorter geminates than central and southern speakers. However, experimental data proving such claims is largely missing. In this article, we perform an analysis of the CLIPS corpus with the aim of comparing gemination for northern versus central and southern speakers of Italian. The analysis of different data types (target words in isolated position, read sentences, dialogues, local radio and TV broadcasts) revealed that: (a) geminate consonants are produced by all speakers, incl. northern speakers; (b) differences in the magnitude of consonant lengthening are small (< 19 ms) and reach significance only for some data types; (c) the shortening of vowels preceding geminate consonants is mainly restricted to isolated target words in nuclear position, with no significant differences between northern and central/ southern speakers. We argue that regional differences in Italian gemination have been overestimated and overemphasized in the literature. In fact, the evidence suggests that they are not as sizeable as previously thought, probably because of the progressive standardization of the language.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Aug 29, 2022
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jun 21, 2021
Proceedings of the 14th EURALEX International Congress, 2010
We shall explain how different pronunciation variants were selected for inclusion in the dictiona... more We shall explain how different pronunciation variants were selected for inclusion in the dictionary and how the transcriptions of anglicisms had to be adapted to the phonology and phonetics of Italian. A discussion will follow about the effects caused by the juxtaposition of English and Italian transcriptions. In fact, because of the intereference of the two phonetic and phonological systems, traditional conventions were in some cases abandoned in favour of more accurate phonetic transcriptions: this has been done with the aim of illustrating the most remarkable differences between the pronunciation of the words by Italian and English speakers.
This paper is intended to discuss aspects of durational variability of V-to-V intervals in Italia... more This paper is intended to discuss aspects of durational variability of V-to-V intervals in Italian from a phonetically based perspective. Recently, the interest in the phonetic properties underlying rhythm typologies has been growing, also as a consequence of the repeatedly observed weakness of phonological factors in the explanation of rhythmic differences. Timing is only one of the many aspects contributing to language rhythm. The speaker and the text are fundamental sources of variation, in the sense that rhythm depends far more on individual timing strategies than on the phonological structure of a language.
Applying durational metrics to recorded speech vs. TTS
ABSTRACT The present study is motivated by the observation that TTS samples of concatenative synt... more ABSTRACT The present study is motivated by the observation that TTS samples of concatenative synthesis may often sound as a-rhythmic to the human ear. For this reason, we aimed at comparing samples of speech from real speakers (studio recordings) vs. synthetic samples. We followed a fairly complicated procedure in order to obtain comparable samples, including several steps. First, we selected 2000 recorded sentences of (each) English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese from bigger speech corpora (1 speaker per language). Then, we further divided them into (a) 1500 sentences to be included in the speech-base of the TTS system, and (b) 500 sentences for test. The former 1500 sentences were used to create TTS voices (for each of the six languages), with which we synthesized the latter 500 sentences. We thereby obtained 500 sentences in two flavours, i.e. as recorded samples and as TTS samples. These were all automatically segmented starting from the text, which was itself phonetically transcribed by our in-house software. The result of the transcription and segmentation was then converted to C and V intervals by an ad-hoc script and imported to R for analysis. Pearson's correlation coefficient was calculated for each segment of recorded speech vs. TTS samples. Results show that correlation is high overall (ranging from 0.82 to 0.93 for the six speaker-TTS pairs) and prove that concatenative synthesis is able to reproduce global durational characteristics of speech. Values for the most popular rhythm metrics (deltas, %V, PVIs, CCIs) were also computed and plotted to charts to illustrate durational variability for the samples. Results for recorded samples of the six languages studied here reflect previous results reported in the literature: English and German samples tend to show greater durational variability than French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese; and they tend to have lower vocalic percentage. Results for TTS samples also show the very same trend. In fact, the mean values for each TTS system tends to sit very close to its recorded speech counterpart. Also, it is remarkable that no general trend was found to connect TTS samples with their recorded speech counterpart: that is to say, TTS samples may sometimes show (slightly) more or (slightly) less durational variability of C and V segments: there does not seem to be a general tendency in our data in this respect. We claim that traditional rhythm correlates are global measures that account for average durational variability of speech samples. They are good at giving a general overview of the rhythmic/timing properties of speech, but they are not able to detect specific local a-rhythmical phenomena found in TTS output, which are probably rooted in the prosodic pattern of the sentence. In the future, it would be desirable to develop acoustic indices that are able to detect such phenomena.
Voice assimilation of morphemic -s in the L2 English of L1 French, L1 Italian and L1 Spanish learners
Anglophonia, Dec 20, 2020
Cette etude examine la regle d'assimilation progressive de voisement du -s morphemique final ... more Cette etude examine la regle d'assimilation progressive de voisement du -s morphemique final en anglais L2. Nous avons analyse les donnees du corpus IPCE-IPAC de productions orales d'apprenants en mesurant la periodicite de toutes les realisations du -s morphemique et nous avons compare trois groupes de locuteurs : 15 francophones natifs, 15 italophones natifs et 10 hispanophones natifs. En nous appuyant sur les distributions et sur le statut phonologique de [s] et [z] dans les L1 des apprenants, ainsi que sur le SLM (Speech Learning Model) et la MDH (Markedness Differential Hypothesis), nous avons emis l'hypothese que les locuteurs francophones et italophones natifs seraient capables de reproduire la regle d'assimilation de voisement de l'anglais plus facilement que les apprenants hispanophones natifs. Nos predictions ne sont que partiellement confirmees par les resultats obtenus : les apprenants francophones natifs (dont la L1 presente /s/ et /z/ en qualite de phonemes en position finale) reussissent effectivement mieux a reproduire les schemas de periodicite. Cependant, les hispanophones natifs reproduisent la regle de voisement de maniere plus fidele que les italophones natifs. Nous comparons ces resultats avec notre etude precedente sur /s/ et /z/ non-morphemiques par les memes locuteurs et nous les discutons en relation avec la marque de ces deux sons. Nous proposons que l’opposition de voix entre /s/ ~ /z/ pourrait constituer une exception a la hierarchie de la marque pour les contrastes de voix des consonnes obstruantes (debut de mot < milieu de mot < fin de mot), ou la position finale de mot ne se revele pas plus marquee que les autres. De plus, les resultats de nos deux etudes revelent des differences de voisement concernant les sibilantes morphemiques et non-morphemiques dans les productions d’anglais L2 (comme pour l’anglais L1). Cela pourrait avoir des repercussions sur les modeles d’acquisition de la phonologie des langues secondes, car ces modeles ne prennent actuellement pas en compte une interaction entre les sons d’une L2 et leur statut morphologique.
Falling Yes/No Questions in Corsican French and Corsican: Evidence for a Prosodic Transfer
Prosody, phonology and phonetics, 2015
To distinguish between questions and statements, the use of high pitch has been claimed to prevai... more To distinguish between questions and statements, the use of high pitch has been claimed to prevail cross-linguistically. However, the implementation of the high pitch feature may differ across languages and dialects. Terminal rises for questions are probably the most widespread (and French is no exception), but initial high tones and final falls may also be observed in the French variety spoken in Corsica as well as in the Corsican language. This chapter investigates to what extent these patterns can be measured, perceived and interpreted as a prosodic transfer from Corsican to Corsican French. A corpus of transparent sentences (i.e. similar, easily intercomprehensible 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. Two perception experiments were conducted. The first one, using delexicalisation, focused on the comparison between Corsican, Corsican French and Parisian French question prosodies: it revealed a significant bias of Corsican French question prosody towards Corsican prosody. The second experiment focused on question/statement discrimination: it showed, in particular, that Corsican French questions are often misidentified as statements by Parisian listeners but accurately identified by Corsican listeners. Several (socio)linguistic hypotheses are finally put forth to account for these results.
Scienza multilingue per ispanofoni
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 31, 2009
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody, Poznań, Poland, 2018
This paper investigates the effects of lexical stress on vowel durations, vowel space and vowel q... more This paper investigates the effects of lexical stress on vowel durations, vowel space and vowel quality in Spanish. Data come from oral productions of 22 Spanish speakers (10 from Madrid and 12 from Mexico City) performing different tasks. As for durational cues, we found that vowel durations play a role as a cue of lexical stress. Interestingly, our results also show differences between the two varieties (the stressed-unstressed ratio being larger for Mexican than Madrilenian speakers). Instead, we show that the expansion/compression of the vowel space is not affected by lexical stress, but it does seem to be affected by the task type. We found, however, that lexical stress can affect vowel quality in certain cases: unstressed /a/ and /o/ tend to be centralized. We discuss these results in the light of previous research reporting effects of lexical stress on vowel spectral quality in different varieties of Spanish