Cristel Portes

Voice Quality and Gender Stereotypes: A Study of Lebanese Women With Reinke's Edema

Purpose Women with Reinkes edema (RW) report being mistaken for men during telephone conversations. For this reason, their masculine-sounding voices are interesting for the study of gender stereotypes. The studys objective is to verify their complaint and to understand the cues used in gender identification. Method Using a self-evaluation study, we verified RWs perception of their own voices. We compared the acoustic parameters of vowels produced by 10 RW to those produced by 10 men and 10 women with healthy voices (hereafter referred to as NW) in Lebanese Arabic. We conducted a perception study for the evaluation of RW, healthy mens, and NW voices by naïve listeners. Results RW self-evaluated their voices as masculine and their gender identities as feminine. The acoustic parameters that distinguish RW from NW voices concern fundamental frequency, spectral slope, harmonicity of the voicing signal, and complexity of the spectral envelope. Naïve listeners very often rate RW as surely masculine. Conclusions Listeners may rate RWs gender incorrectly. These incorrect gender ratings are correlated with acoustic measures of fundamental frequency and voice quality. Further investigations will reveal the contribution of each of these parameters to gender perception and guide the treatment plan of patients complaining of a gender ambiguous voice.

Prosodic Realizations of Information Focus in French

In this chapter, we provide empirical evidence on the prosodic marking of information focus (IF) in French. We report results from an elicitation experiment and two perception experiments. Based on these experiments, we propose that phrases that resolve a question are set off by two types of intonational markers in French: they host the nuclear pitch accent (NPA) on their right edge and/or they are intonationally highlighted by an initial rise (IR). These intonational markers are very often realized conjointly but can also be applied separately thus leading to considerable variation in our elicitation data. We will propose that some of the variation can be explained by differences in the function of NPA and IR: NPA placement is sensitive to the informational/illocutionary partitioning of the content of utterances, while IRs are sensitive to different types of semantic or pragmatic salience. We also suggest that “question/answer” pairs provide a criterion to identify the IF only if the answer is congruent. Answers may, however, contribute to implicit questions resulting in different prosodic realizations.

Do patients with schizophrenia use prosody to encode contrastive discourse status

Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) often display social cognition disorders, including Theory of Mind (ToM) impairments and communication disruptions. Thought language disorders appear to be primarily a disruption of pragmatics, SZ can also experience difficulties at other linguistic levels including the prosodic one. Here, using an interactive paradigm, we showed that SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode the contrastive status of discourse referents in French. We used a semi-spontaneous task to elicit noun-adjective pairs in which the noun in the second noun-adjective fragment was identical to the noun in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron “brown candies” vs. BONBONS violets “purple candies”) or could contrast with it (e.g., BOUGIES violettes “purple candles” vs. BONBONS violets “purple candies”). We found that healthy controls parsed the target noun in the second noun-adjective fragment separately from the color adjective, to warn their interlocutor that this noun constituted a contrastive entity (e.g., BOUGIES violettes followed by [BONBONS] [violets]) compared to when it referred to the same object as in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron followed by [BONBONS violets]). On the contrary, SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode contrastive status of target nouns. In addition, SZs difficulties to use prosody of contrast were correlated to their score in a classical ToM task (i.e., the hinting task). Taken together, our data provide evidence that SZ patients exhibit difficulties to prosodically encode discourse statuses and sketch a potential relationship between ToM and the use of linguistic prosody.

A multimodal study of answers to disruptions

The interaction between Members of Parliament (MPs) is convention-based and rule-regulated. As instantiations of individual and group confrontations, parliamentary debates display well-regulated competing discursive processes. Unauthorised interruptions are spontaneous verbal reactions of MPs who interrupt the current speaker. This paper focuses on the answers of the current speaker to these disruptions. It introduces an annotation scheme for a political debate dataset which is mainly in the form of video annotations and audio annotations. The annotations contain information ranging from general linguistic to domain specific information. Some is annotated with automatic tools, and some is manually annotated. One of the goals is to use the information to predict the categories of the answers by the speaker to the disruptions. A typology of such answers is proposed and an automatic categorization system based on a multimodal parametrization is successfully performed.

When pitch Accents Encode Speaker Commitment: Evidence from French Intonation

Recent studies on a variety of languages have shown that a speaker’s commitment to the propositional content of his or her utterance can be encoded, among other strategies, by pitch accent types. Since prior research mainly relied on lexical-stress languages, our understanding of how speakers of a non-lexical-stress language encode speaker commitment is limited. This paper explores the contribution of the last pitch accent of an intonation phrase to convey speaker commitment in French, a language that has stress at the phrasal level as well as a restricted set of pitch accents. In a production experiment, participants had to produce sentences in two pragmatic contexts: unbiased questions (the speaker had no particular belief with respect to the expected answer) and negatively biased questions (the speaker believed the proposition to be false). Results revealed that negatively biased questions consistently exhibited an additional unaccented F0 peak in the preaccentual syllable (an H+!H* pitch accent) while unbiased questions were often realized with a rising pattern across the accented syllable (an H* pitch accent). These results provide evidence that pitch accent types in French can signal the speaker’s belief about the certainty of the proposition expressed in French. It also has implications for the phonological model of French intonation.

Earlier or Higher? Comparing French rising-falling contour with rising contour in a corpus of conversation

Abstract In French intonation, a rising-falling contour (RF) has been described by many authors, but the characteristics of its phonetic realization as well at its phonological status remain controversial. Is its f0 movement temporally aligned earlier compared to the f0 movement of the simple rise (R)? Or is it scaled higher in the speaker’s pitch range? Does it convey conviction and obviousness while the simple rise rather announces that the speaker has more to say? Firstly, the present study compared the phonetic implementation of RF and R in a corpus of naturally occurring conversation. Through the application of a wavelet-based functional mixed model, we could detect significant differences between the shapes of the f0 curves corresponding to RF and R contours. Results show that RF and R mainly differ with respect to the timing of the rise and the amplitude of the falling part. They thus support the claim that these characteristics are more important than the scaling of the pitch peak for the implementation of the contrast between RF and R. Secondly, the results of a forced choice identification task performed by naive listeners show that they consistently associate the RF contour with the expression of conviction and obviousness and the R contour with the indication that the speaker has more to say.