Philippe Boula de Mareüil

The contribution of prosody to the perception of foreign accent

The general goal of this study was to expand our understanding of what is meant by ‘foreign accent’. More specifically, it deals with the role of prosody (timing and melody), which has rarely been examined. New technologies, including diphone speech synthesis (experiment 1) and speech manipulation (experiment 2), are used to study the relative importance of prosody in what is perceived as a foreign accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantation paradigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here, it is applied to Spanish and Italian. We built up a dozen sentences which are spoken in almost the same way in both languages (e.g. ha visto la casa del presidente americano ‘you/(s)he saw the American president’s house’). Spanish/Italian monolinguals and bilinguals were recorded. We then studied what is perceived when the segmental specification of an utterance is combined with suprasegmental features belonging to a different language. Under these conditions, results obtained with Spanish and Italian listeners suggest that prosody is important in identifying Spanish-accented Italian and Italian-accented Spanish.

A Diachronic Study of Initial Stress and other Prosodic Features in the French News Announcer Style: Corpus-based Measurements and Perceptual Experiments

This study focuses on prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic and perceptual analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically. Two prosodic features, which may give an impression of emphatic style, are explored: word-initial stress and penultimate vowel lengthening, especially before a pause. Objective measurements suggest that the following features have decreased since the 40s: mean pitch, pitch rise associated with initial stress, vowel duration characterizing an emphatic initial stress, and prepausal penultimate lengthening. The onsets of stressed initial syllables have become longer while speech rate (measured at the phonemic level) has not changed. This puzzling outcome raises interesting questions for research on French prosody, suggesting that the durational correlates of word-initial stress have changed over time, in the French news announcer style. Three perceptual experiments were conducted using prosody transplantation (copy of fundamental frequency and duration parameters on a synthetic voice), delexicalization and imitation. Rather than manipulating the parameters of, say, word-initial stress, we selected a subset of the corpus to represent the different decades under investigation. Results show that, among other factors, fundamental frequency and duration correlates of prosody contribute to distinguishing early recordings from more recent ones. The higher the pitch and the greater the pitch movements associated with word-initial stress, the more the speech samples are perceived as dating back to the 40s or 50s.

Falling Yes/No Questions in Corsican French and Corsican: Evidence for a Prosodic Transfer

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.