Amandine Michelas

• Ph. D
• Researcher at Aix-Marseille University

Accentuation is encoded by both durational and pitch cues in French. While previous research agrees that the sole presence of pitch cues is sufficient to encode accentuation in French, the role of durational cues is less clear. In four cue-weighting accent perception experiments, we examined the role of pitch and durational cues in French listeners...

In this EEG study, we examined the ability of French listeners to perceive and use the position of stress in a discrimination task. Event-Related-Potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a same-different task. Different stimuli diverged either in one phoneme (e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/-/ʒy'ʁɔ̃/) or in stress position (e.g., /ʒy'ʁi/-/'ʒyʁi/)....

In this study, we provided a more in-depth examination of the ability of French listeners to perceive and use the location of accent in a discrimination task. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants performed a same-different task. Different stimuli diverged either in one phoneme (e.g., /'ʒyʁi/-/'ʒyʁɔ/) or in accent locatio...

This repetition priming study examined how word accentual variation in French is represented and processed during spoken word recognition. Mismatched primes in the accentual pattern were less effective than matched primes in facilitating target word recognition when the targets were presented in the left ear but not in the right ear. This indicates...

1/ Question(s) raised and problematicThe aim of this article is to show how research at the Speech and Language Laboratory (Laboratoire Parole et Langage, hereafter LPL) contributes in a significant way to the renewal of knowledge on the prosody of language and languages. It shows how the work of LPL members attempts to address the following questi...

The temporal dynamics by which linguistic information becomes available is one of the key properties to understand how language is organized in the brain. An unresolved debate between different brain language models is whether words, the building blocks of language, are activated in a sequential or parallel manner. In this study we approached this...

In two ABX experiments using natural and synthetic stimuli, we examined the ability of French listeners to perceive accentual variation by manipulating the ear of presentation. A native (/balɔ̃/-/baˈlɔ̃/) and a non-native (/ˈbalɔ̃/-/baˈlɔ̃/) accentual contrasts were tested. The stimuli A and B varied in accent (/ˈbalɔ̃/-/baˈlɔ̃/), in one phoneme (/...

The temporal dynamics by which linguistic information becomes available is one of the key properties to understand how language is organised in the brain. An unresolved debate between different brain language models is whether words, the building blocks of language, are activated in a sequential or parallel manner. In this study we approached this...

Traditionally, language production and perception have been studied separately, but investigating both jointly is needed to understand language use in its default context: conversation.Presently, however, the overlap between both modalities is unclear, even for the basic build-ing blocks of language, words. We aim at filling this gap by comparing t...

A long-term priming experiment examined the way stress information is processed and represented in French speakers’ mind. Repeated prime and target words either matched (/bãˈdo/ – /bãˈdo/ “headband”) or mismatched their stress pattern (/bãdo/ – /bãˈdo/). In comparison to a control condition (/maʁ/ – /bãˈdo/), the results showed that matching and mi...

How does the knowledge shared by interlocutors during interaction modify the way speakers speak? Specifically, how does prosody change when speakers know that their addressees do not share the same knowledge as them? We studied these effects in an interactive paradigm in which French speakers gave instructions to addressees about where to place a c...

Background/aims: In French, the size of a focus constituent is not reliably marked through pitch accent assignment as in many stress accent languages. While it has been argued that the distribution of lower-level prosodic boundaries plays a role, this is at best a weak cue to focus, leaving open the question of whether other marking strategies are...

Previous studies have suggested that French listeners experience difficulties when they have to discriminate between words that differ in stress. A limitation is that these studies used stress patterns that do not respect the rules of stress placement in French. In this study, three stress patterns were tested on bisyllabic words (1) the legal stre...

Cet article a pour objectif d’expliciter le lien direct qui existe entre les travaux en prosodie menes aujourd’hui a Aix-en-Provence et les travaux qui ont ete conduits depuis les annees 70 par ce que l’on appelait alors « l’Ecole d’Aix en Prosodie ». Ce lien sera etabli au moyen de trois notions principales : les notions de cible tonale, de consti...

This event-related potential study examined whether French listeners use stress at a phonological level when discriminating between stressed and unstressed words in their language. Participants heard five words and made same/different decisions about the final word (male voice) with respect to the four preceding words (different female voices). Com...

This event-related potential study examined whether French listeners use stress at a phonological level when discriminating between stressed and unstressed words in their language. Participants heard five words and made same/different decisions about the final word (male voice) with respect to the four preceding words (different female voices). Com...

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 commitme...

This study tests how prosodic boundary strength (i.e., categorical differences between Accentual Phrase, AP, and intermediate phrase, ip, boundaries) per se affects the syntactic parsing of spoken utterances in French. Two forced-choice perception experiments demonstrated that French listeners use prosodic boundary strength (either AP or ip boundar...

The aim of this study was to test if the meaning of intonational contours involves speaker commitment and attitude attribution to the addressee. We examined whether the pragmatic choice of a contour signals how the speaker (S) anticipates the reaction of the addressee (A) to his utterance by attributing attitudes to him and calling for his next mov...

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 parad...

Within the autosegmental-metrical approach to French intonation, the existence of an intermediate phrase or ip is controversial. Our study provides strong evidence for its existence, by uncovering systematic pitch-scaling effects within this constituent. We first show that the presence of an ip-break is responsible for blocking recursive downstep o...

While recent crosslinguistic studies have shown that the degree of speaker's commitment or certainty is encoded intonationally either in a gradient or categorical fashion, our understanding of how French speakers use Intonational-Phrase (IP) final contours to signal their degree of certainty is limited. This paper investigates the contribution of a...

Much recent work on German and English intonation has addressed the impact of information structure on prosodic patterns in terms of the focus/background partition. In contrast with stress-accent languages such as Italian, Spanish or English, French does not appear to signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it appears to mainly exploit...

Though two levels of phrasing are generally accepted for French, a large degree of intra-speaker variability in the amount of preboundary lengthening is generally found within the lowest level (the Accentual Phrase or AP). A question that still remains to be answered is whether this source of variability is merely due to speech rate fluctuations or...

In contrast with stress-accent languages, French does not signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it largely exploits phrasing (Féry, 2001; D'Imperio et al. 2012). In this study, we used a new experimental paradigm to collect semi-spontaneous data and test the strength of the prosodic boundary located at the right edge of focused eleme...

In contrast with stress-accent languages, French does not signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it largely exploits phrasing (Féry, 2001; D'Imperio, German & Michelas, 2012). In this study, we used a new experimental paradigm to collect semi-spontaneous data and test the strength of the prosodic boundary located at the right edge of...

This study addresses the question of the separate contribution of tonal and duration cues in prosodic boundary marking and their effect in syntactic parsing in French. We used pairs of Noun Phrases whose segmental structure was identical but differing in the potential placement of an Accentual Phrase (AP) or Intermediate Phrase (ip) boundary at the...

Much recent work on German and English intonation has addressed the impact of information structure on prosodic patterns in terms of the focus/background partition. In contrast with stress-accent languages such as Italian, Spanish or English, French does not appear to signal focus through pitch accent assignment, rather it appears to mainly exploit...

French accentual phrases (APs) are characterized by the presence of a typical final fo rise (LH*) and an optional/additional initial fo rise (LHi). This study tested whether between-speaker speech imitation influenced the realization of APs tonal patterns. The experiment was based on APs containing a function word plus a bisyllabic content word, wh...

The work described here is grounded by two major observations. Firstly, most of the French intonation models agree on the existence of two levels of prosodic phrasing: the accentual phrase and the intonation phrase. Secondly, although the existence of an additional level of structure ranked between these two levels has been proposed for French, the...

This study tested whether an Intermediate Phrase (ip) right boundary is interpreted by French listeners as cueing a major syntactic break (e.g. NounPhrase/Verb Phrase break) or also a weaker syntactic break (e.g. Noun Phrase internal boundary). Pairs of Noun Phrases, whose segmental structure was identical up to the sixth syllable, but differing in...

Within the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation, there is only weak evidence for the existence of the intermediate phrase (ip) for French. Our proposal is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level is not merely linked to a specific focus or marked syntactic structure, while predicting that an alignment constraint (ALING-XP,R; ip,R...

In French, a phonological phrase (PP) can either be isomorphic with an accentual phrase (AP, [1]) or else be produced as two separate APs, when possible. The PP has also been recently found to be directly involved in lexical access processing [2], in that a PP boundary might remove a temporary lexical ambiguity. In a set of two experiments, we show...

Studies addressing prosodic constituency in French generally agree on two levels of phrasing (accentual phrase, AP, and intonation phrase, IP), while the existence of an intermediate level of phrasing (intermediate phrase, ip) is still controversial. In this study we examine durational cues in a read speech corpus at normal and fast rates in which...

The two experiments reported here support an analysis based on constraints which reflect the syntax-prosody interface. This analysis proves that the Intermediate Phrase (ip) exists in French. The ip is ranked higher than the Accentual Phrase and smaller than the Intonation Phrase in the prosodic hierarchy and it is not restricted to specific syntac...

The two experiments reported here support an analysis based on constraints which reflect the syntax-prosody interface. This analysis proves that the Intermediate Phrase (ip) exists in French. The ip is ranked higher than the Accentual Phrase and smaller than the Intonation Phrase in the prosodic hierarchy and it is not restricted to specific syntac...

Within the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonation (Pierrehumbert, 1980; Ladd, 1996), there is only weak evidence for the existence of the intermediate phrase (ip) for French. Our assumption is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level (ip) in French is not merely linked to a specific focus or marked syntactic structure and predict t...

The existence of an intermediate level of phrasing (ip) has been shown for several Germanic as well as Romance languages. There is some evidence for this intermediate level of phrasing in French even if its status is still controversial. Our assumption is that the emergence of an intermediate prosodic level (ip) in French is not simply linked to a...

In French, a phonological phrase (PP) can either be isomorphic with an accentual phrase (AP) or else be produced as two separate APs, when possible. The PP has also been recently found to be directly involved in lexical access processing, in that a PP boundary might remove a temporary lexical ambiguity. In a set of two experiments, we show here tha...

One of the theoretical problems related to prosodic phrasing (independent of the language observed) concerns the hierarchical nature and the number of potential constituents. Most of the studies referring to prosodic constituency have been conducted within the classic Prosodic Phonology framework in which prosodic constituency is viewed as a hierar...

A fundamental question that remains to be answered is how listeners are able to parse prosodic structure in spoken utterances and build syntactic phrases out of them. For French, recent studies have shown that prosodic cues at Phonological Phrase boundaries seem to be employed to parse syntactic structure (Millote, 2008). Models of French intonatio...

In French, the initial phoneme sequence (up to the syllable /vo/) of complex noun phrases such as cerf volant /s / "kite" and cerf vorace /s "voracious deer" can yield a temporarily ambiguous parse between cerveau /s "brain" and cerf /s "deer". It has recently been proposed that the prosodic organization of speech might interact with this type of a...