Anne Hermes

French National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie (UMR 7018)

In this study we investigate the timing of word-initial clusters and its relation to distinct phonological syllable parses in Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish. To this end, we use experimental, articulographic data (steps 1 and 2) combined with computer-based simulation (step 3). In step 1, we test how temporal properties of consonantal clusters such as...

Acoustic studies have revealed that patients with Essential Tremor treated with thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) may suffer from speech deterioration in terms of imprecise oral articulation and reduced voicing control. Based on the acoustic signal one cannot infer, however, whether this deterioration is due to a general slowing down of the spe...

We report on an articulatory study which uses an electromagnetic articulograph to investigate word-initial consonant clusters in Italian. In particular, we investigate clusters involving a sibilant, such as in spina ‘thorn’. The status of the sibilant in such clusters, referred to as ‘impure s’, is an unresolved problem for the syllable phonology o...

Der kleinste gemeinsame Nenner in Untersuchungen zur Silbe als strukturelle Einheit besteht in der Annahme, dass sich Konsonanten und Vokale in Silben organisieren. Dennoch sind Silbengrenzen und Silbenzugehörigkeiten schwierig im akustischen Signal zu bestimmen, und phonologische Silbenkonzepte weichen teilweise stark voneinander ab. In dynamische...

In this study we investigated the coordination of consonantal and vocalic gestures in Tashlhiyt Berber as a function of their subsyllabic constituency. The aim was to determine whether the syllabification proposed of word initial clusters is reflected in the coordination of articulatory gestures. Two main results were obtained: (1) The timing of co...

This study presents an innovative approach to speech breathing analysis, emphasizing the potential of Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) as a viable tool. We compared the widely used Respiratory Inductive Plethysmography (RIP) with EMA by collecting speech breathing data from 18 speakers during sustained vowel productions of /a/ under habitual an...

A common goal of kinematic studies on disordered speech is the identification of speech motor impairments that negatively impact speech function. Although it is well-known that the kinematic contours of speakers with speech disorders often deviate considerably from those of neurotypical speakers, systematic quantitative assessments of these impairm...

The study investigated how the movements of the tongue vary across different ages for prosodic focus marking. We collected articulatory recordings from 44 German speakers, aged 19 to 79 years, and analyzed the phonetic characteristics of vowel production, such as position, velocity, and duration of the vocalic gesture. Across all ages we found more...

This paper presents a study on the temporal and spectral characteristics of oral and nasal vowels in French read speech, produced by speakers from 25 to 90 years. The study utilizes a set of eight vowel categories and combines classical vowel space-related metrics with MFCC parametrization to accurately include nasal vowels. In total 15,375 vowels...

This study examines the interaction between lexical prominence and palatal/velar consonants in Italian. The specific phenomenon of interest is the palatalization of /k/ in, e.g., 'cardiaci' [kar.ˈdi.a.tʃi] but not in 'ubriachi' [u.bri.ˈa.ki], which is argued to be conditioned by the position of /k/ relative to lexical prominence. The aim of the stu...

To better understand coordination beyond the syllable, we investigate inter-syllable coordination in French, depending on the boundary separating the syllables, i.e., a syllable boundary within a word vs. a word boundary in a subject-verb phrase. Patterns of coordination are inferred by acoustical measures of V-to-V anticipatory coarticulation and...

This case study describes lingual articulatory strategies for French [ʁ] as it pertains to a monolingual, native speaker of French, and two English-Spanish bilinguals, learners of French as their third language (L3). We tracked movements of the tongue using electromagnetic articulography (EMA) in order to investigate inter-speaker differences invol...

The current study explores how different types of external sandhi in French affect the temporal coordination of gestures. Specifically, we examine the temporal coordination of three different types of CV in French (Onset CV, Enchaînement CV, and Liaison CV) at normal and fast speech rates. The results from this articulatory study revealed that the...

Labialization is the most widely distributed secondary articulation in the world's languages, however, literature on its phonetic properties is rare. This study provides an analysis of acoustic and articulatory markings of labialization in Tashlhiyt Amazigh. We present speech production data from six native speakers producing a set of plain and lab...

Acoustic studies have shown, that effects of aging can impact the level of speech motor control including a slower speech tempo and a reduced vowel space, especially with an increased instability of speech patterns above the age of 60 years. Furthermore, a gradual, non-linear decrease in the degree of coarticulation has been reported for French wit...

A common goal of speech kinematic studies on dysarthric speech is the identification of the speech motor impairments that negatively impact speech function (e.g., precision, rate, intelligibility). However, to date, such research efforts are methodologically challenging. One major obstacle is the complex mapping between poorly defined (variable) a...

This study aims to explore the effects of healthy aging and Parkinson’s disease on speech motor performance. One area of speech production which requires fine speech motor control is promi-nence marking. Therefore, strategies of prominence marking of three speaker groups with four speakers each were investigated: younger speakers, older speakers, a...

We are pleased to announce a call for papers in a special issue focusing on the topic: "Aging- and Disease-related Changes in Speech Production". Abstract submission deadline: 15 February 2021; Notification of abstract acceptance: 1 March 2021; Full Manuscript Deadline: 15 July 2021. Further information here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/languag...

Across life span there is inter alia a change in respiration in that with increasing age, the ribcage cannot expand and contract as well during breathing and the diaphragm becomes weakened. These changes are expected to affect the control of breathing and thus also prosodic structuring. Studies investigating the effects of aging on speech breathing...

Across life span there is inter alia a change in respiration in that with increasing age, the ribcage cannot expand and contract as well during breathing and the diaphragm becomes weakened. These changes are expected to affect the control of breathing and thus also prosodic structuring. Studies investigating the effects of aging on speech breathing...

In this study, we aim to gain insights into whether there exists an invariant durational property which can uniquely distinguish between singletons and geminates, both across languages and across speech rates. We collected acoustic data from four typologically distinct languages (Tashlhiyt, Japanese, Italian and Finnish) and so far, recorded one sp...

The aim of the present study is to investigate the effect of aging on prosodic prominence in German. Therefore, we recorded older and younger speakers with Electromagnetic Articulography to track tongue body movements during the production of vowels. Both speaker groups maintain prominence relations by adjustments of the supra-laryngeal system. Thi...

An understanding of the relations between speech rate and articulatory timing is critical to developing adequate models of articulatory control. In the case of geminate consonants, not much is known about how articulatory timing varies with speech rate, nor is it known whether the form of variation is similar between singletons and geminates. We in...

In addition to durational differences between singletons and geminates, the phonetic implementation of gemination may have implications for most, if not all of a form’s phonetic shape, including temporal differences in adjacent vowels (Engstrand & Krull 1994, Payne 2005, Ridouane 2007). Variation in speech rate may have dramatic influence on these...

This study investigates coordination patterns in Georgian word onset clusters.

Speech research mostly excludes the aged population. While there exists lots of research in language acquisition on the development of linguistic structure, there is a lack of research on language attrition. The behaviour of the speech system in the aged population will provide insights into how linguistic structures are realized on different phono...

An understanding of the relations between speech rate and articulatory timing is critical to developing adequate models of articulatory control. In the case of geminate consonants, not much is known about how articulatory timing varies with speech rate, nor is it known whether the form of variation is similar between singletons and geminates. We in...

To assess a phonological theory, we often compare its predictions to phonetic observations. This can be complicated, however, because it requires a theoretical model that maps from phonological representations to articulatory and acoustic observations. In this studywe are concernedwith the question of howphonetic observations are interpreted in rel...

The current study aims to shed light on the effects of aging on prosodic structuring by analysing several durational parameters in sentences differing in length and complexity. This study provides evidence that (i) all age groups produce phrasal breaks at expected syntactic boundaries, (ii) older speakers produced much longer pausal breaks, slower...

In this study, we explore the effect of aging on the realization of accented and unaccented syllables in German by exploring prosodic marking in the acoustic dimension. Our results indicate that although both age groups mark prosodic prominence by means of lengthening the stressed vowel, older speakers exhibit even more lengthening, less variable f...

In the present study, we investigate intragestural parameters during the production of CV syllables in natural sentence production of Essential Tremor (ET) patients treated with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). Within the task dynamic approach, we analyzed temporal and spatial parameters of consonantal and vocalic movements of the respective target sy...

According to the segmental anchor hypothesis within the Autosegmental-Metrical approach, tones are aligned with segmental boundaries of consonant and vowels in the acoustic domain. In prenuclear rising pitch accents (LH*), the rise is assumed to occur in the vicinity of the accented syllable it is phonologically associated with. However, there are...

This study investigated syllable coordination patterns in Essential Tremor (ET) patients treated with Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) by using electromagnetic articulography. We analyzed articulatory timing patterns for nine ET patients with activated and inactivated DBS and compared them to a group of healthy age-matched controls. We focused on timin...

In this study, we present a non-invasive method for investigating laryngeal movement in the production of ejective sounds. Being non-invasive, this method can be used easily in the study of spontaneous speech. Typically, EMA is used to track the tongue and lip movements in speech production. In this study, we recorded four Georgian native speakers...

Stereotactic coordinates. Stereotactic coordinates from 24 electrodes with reference to the midcommissural point (MCP). Stimulation parameters: amplitude (V; mA), pulse duration (μsec) and stimulation frequency (Hz). (PDF)

Speech variation is a naturally-induced phenomenon in human speech communication which can be attributed to the inevitably multifaceted nature of interactions between various higher-order linguistic and lower-order physiological factors. Speech is dynamic, and it is assumed that there are regulation mechanisms behind these complex interactions of s...

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM) is performed to suppress medically-resistant essential tremor (ET). However, stimulation induced dysarthria (SID) is a common side effect, limiting the extent to which tremor can be suppressed. To date, the exact pathogenesis of SID in VIM-DBS treated ET patients is...

Dysarthria is a common side effect of VIM-DBS. In recent studies, we used acoustic parameters to show deterioration in speech of ET patients under stimulation. We found changes in the glottal and oral systems while DBS is on, specifically an increase of voicing during the entire syllable cycle as well as frication during the consonantal constrictio...

We aim to quantify the effects of VIM-DBS on speech regulation mechanisms in patients with Essential Tremor (ET).

In this study, we investigate the effect of VIM-DBS on speech in ET patients. We compare how uni- vs. bilateral DBS contributes to the severity of stimulation induced dysarthria (SID) by means of acoustic measures, and investigate if these measures co-vary with measures of perceived tempo and intelligibility.

The aim of the study was to determine how patients with essential tremor (ET) evaluate the functional, physical and emotional effects of VIM-DBS on their speech in everyday life. In order to classify these effects relating to ICF (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health) the voice handicap index (VHI) was applied. Speech...

The aim of the present study is to capture the variation of continuous phonetic parameters associated with distinct phonological syllable organisations in Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish. In a first step, we investigate stability patterns for simple and complex onset coordination based on EMA data. In a second step, we test the degree of perturbation o...

The present study is the first kinematic study to investigate the speech production of ET patients with VIM-DBS. More specifically, it explores the coordination patterns of articulatory gestures in syllables with simple and complex onsets, CV and CCV, in German. It provides a preliminary analysis of gestural coordination under stimulation for the t...

In this study we investigated word-initial geminates in Maltese, focusing on sub-segmental acoustic durations: constriction duration and, where appropriate, VOT; and the duration of adjacent segments: the tonic vowel duration and the duration of the inter-consonantal interval spanning the word boundary. This latter interval, between the consonant i...

In this study, we investigate the effect of bilateral VIM‐DBS on speech production in patients with essential tremor (ET). We use rate‐controlled syllable repetitions to employ acoustic parameters related to stimulation induced dysarthria (SID), both with and without stimulation.

Essential Tremor, Deep Brain Stimulation, Dysarthria, Electromagnetic Articulography

In the present study, we use a computational model proposed by Shaw and colleagues to evaluate the behaviour of stability indices for word initial clusters. Since phonetic stability indices are known not to be robust against prosodic and contextual variation, this computational model utilises phonetic parameters to predict phonological syllable org...

This study investigates the acoustic realization of word initial lexical and surface geminates in Maltese. Word initial gemination in Maltese occurs through a morphological process in both Semitic and non-Semitic verbs. Surface geminates arise through the assimilation of the definite article before coronal sounds (il → it in it-tama). In these surf...

Tashlhiyt is famous for its particularly marked syllable structure. Unlike the majority of world languages, including some related Berber varieties, Tashlhiyt allows not only vowels but all consonants – including voiceless stops /t/, /k/ or /q/ – to be nuclei of a syllable (e.g., [tkmi] `she smoked' is analyzed as bisyllabic where the sequence [tk]...

When we speak we do not articulate each sound one after the other like beads on a string. Instead, the movements of our articulators, such as the tongue and lips, overlap. These movements are coordinated in complex ways to produce syllables, words and phrases. This book is concerned with syllables. What is a syllable? There is general consensus tha...

In this study we investigate the articulatory coordination of word initial consonant clusters in Italian. We show that these clusters are generally coordinated in a similar way to clusters in languages with complex syllable onsets, in that the timing of the rightmost consonantal gesture in relation to the vocalic gesture is adjusted according to th...

This study investigates the temporal coordination of tones and constriction gestures in Catalan and Viennese German using electromagnetic articulography. It is observed that nuclear rises are later in German than in Catalan. We model the difference in tonal alignment patterns using a coupled oscillator model, proposing that it can emerge from diffe...

This study provides evidence from the coordination of articulatory gestures, using electromagnetic articulography (EMMA), in favour of a heterosyllabic analysis of word initial clusters in Tashlhiyt. Evidence from calculations of C-center and Rightmost C to a following anchor in the syllable as well as the stability index consistently supports the...

This study is concerned with the alignment of f0 peaks in rising LH pitch accents in German, both in relation to acoustically defined segments, referred to as segmental anchors, as well as to dynamically defined speech gestures, referred to as articulatory anchors. The effects investigated were the effects of syllable structure (test words ˈCV:CV a...

We investigated the effect of dialectal background on tonal alignment in LH rising pitch accents in two varieti es of German: those spoken in Düsseldorf and Vienna. We confirm the findings of Atterer & Ladd (2004, (1)) that L a nd H tones in prenuclear rises are aligned later in Southern t han in Northern German varieties, and, more specifically, t...

In a production experiment, we investigated the effect of syllable structure on the alignment of H peaks in LH pitch accents in Viennese German. We examined nearby landmarks in the acoustic and kinematic data, as well as non-nearby landmarks corresponding to the vowel in the accented syllable. Although no effect of syllable structure was found in p...

This study reports on a production experiment investigating tonal and articulatory means of encoding different focus structures in German. Using an electromagnetic articulograph, we examined the movements of the upper and lower lips (related to sonority expansion) during the production of target words occurring in four different focus conditions. W...

This study reports on a production experiment investigating articulatory means of encoding different focus structures in German. Previous investigations in this field have been restricted to words in maximally di- verging focus structures (contrastive focus vs. background) and thus to the accented-unaccented dichotomy (Cho 2005; Avesani et al. 2007...