Marielle Bruyninckx

A study of the language dominance effects on bilinguals’ voice quality

This paper examines whether language dominance exerts influences on speaker’s voice quality. Ten French–Polish bilingual subjects, split into a French‐dominant group and a Polish‐dominant group, were selected. They were asked to record five utterances of two balanced texts (one for each language). One FFT‐based LTAS was computed for each utterance. The so‐obtained 100 spectra were compared by means of a pattern recognition procedure: the SDDD dissimilarity index. Two types of within‐speaker comparisons were performed for each subject: within‐language comparisons and between‐language comparisons. The results show that the average SDDD index values derived from the between‐language comparisons score higher than those drawn from within‐language matchings. This confirms our earlier results based on different types of bilinguals. The within‐language FR/FR SDDD index values tend to score higher in the French‐dominant group than the POL/POL ones; the opposite relationship can be observed in Polish‐dominant subje...

Contribution to the study of the audiometrical scores sources of 20 variation

This paper summarizes the development and the presentation of a discrimination test of the relative height of two pure sounds. Sixty pairs of sounds have been presented to 68 subjects. The elaboration of these pairs was based on a selection of ten initial stimuli that were paired according to three different intervals: octave, 1/3 octave, and 11/24 octave. These stimuli were then presented by pairs to the subjects in a random way, according to an ascending or a descending sequential structure. The aim of this work is to test: whether the paired sounds’ presentation order (ascending or descending) has, or has not, an effect on the subjects’ results; whether the kind of frequential interval is a determining factor in the subjects’ discriminatory abilities; whether the musical education plays a role on performances (in comparing musicians’ and nonmusicians’ performances). Together with measurement of reliability, the results show that: it is easier to discriminate sounds in an ascending structure, whatever t...