Caterina Petrone

• Aix-Marseille University

Introduction: While breathing is essential for infant speech development, it has neither been extensively studied empirically nor been included in theories of speech acquisition. In this brief report we aim to explore the co-development of respiratory and vocal control longitudinally in an infant from 7;15 to 9;15 months of age. We focused on this...

Typological research shows that across languages, trilled [r] sounds are more common in adjectives describing rough as opposed to smooth surfaces. In this study, this lexical research is built on with an experiment with speakers of 28 different languages from 12 different families. Participants were presented with images of a jagged and a straight...

In everyday life, visual information often precedes the auditory one, hence influencing its evaluation (e.g., seeing somebody’s angry face makes us expect them to speak to us angrily). By using the cross-modal affective paradigm, we investigated the influence of facial gestures when the subsequent acoustic signal is emotionally unclear (neutral or...

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...

Le domaine des recherches en Phonétique Clinique vise à améliorer nos connaissances sur les pathologies de la parole en confrontant les méthodes et les recherches en phonétique avec les données cliniques et les diagnostics des cliniciens. En France, la Phonétique Clinique s’est développée depuis une trentaine d’années dans une communauté importante...

Conversations (normal speech) or professional interactions (e.g., projected speech in the classroom) have been identified as situations with increased risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 due to the high production of droplets in the exhaled air. However, it is still unclear to what extent speech properties influence droplets emission during everyday lif...

The bouba/kiki effect—the association of the nonce word bouba with a round shape and kiki with a spiky shape—is a type of correspondence between speech sounds and visual properties with potentially deep implications for the evolution of spoken language. However, there is debate over the robustness of the effect across cultures and the influence of...

Speakers strongly vary in their imitation abilities, but the factors underlying this variation are still unclear. This study examined whether individual differences in working memory affect the accuracy of imitation of phonological and phonetic aspects of French prosody. Thirty-six French native speakers were asked to listen to twenty sentences ext...

Linguistic communication requires speakers to mutually agree on the meanings of words, but how does such a system first get off the ground? One solution is to rely on iconic gestures: visual signs whose form directly resembles or otherwise cues their meaning without any previously established correspondence. However, it is debated whether vocalizat...

Although previous research has shown that there exist individual and cross-linguistic differences in planning strategies during language production, little is known about how such individual differences might vary depending on which language a speaker is planning. The present series of studies examines individual differences in planning strategies...

A growing body of evidence reveals that tune meaning is multidimensional and flexible, with the choice of a tune depending both on linguistic and metalinguistic purposes. This study explores how perlocutionary meaning is influenced by tune for requests and offers. Two female speakers of American English produced 96 request-offer pairs in the form o...

This study explores short-term respiratory volume changes in German oral and nasal stops and discusses to what extent these changes may be explained by laryngeal-oral coordination. It is expected that respiratory volumes decrease more rapidly when the glottis and the vocal tract are open after the release of voiceless aspirated stops. Two experimen...

This study investigates whether acoustic correlates of prominence are related to actions of the respiratory system resulting in local changes of subglottal pressure (Psub). Simultaneous recordings were made of acoustics; intraoral pressure (Pio), as an estimate of Psub; and thoracic and abdominal volume changes. Ten German speakers read sentences c...

In the night of January 1st, 2015, mankind approached a size of 7.284.283.000 human beings (see http://www.dsw.org/home.html). In this context, it seems an illusion to study individual behaviour in speech production and perception, even within a certain language. However, inter-individual variation in speech is a topic of increasing interest in lin...

Inter-individual variation in speech is a topic of increasing interest both in human sciences and speech technology. It can yield important insights into biological, cognitive, communicative, and social aspects of language. Written by specialists in psycholinguistics, phonetics, speech development, speech perception and speech technology, this volu...

In Neapolitan Italian, nuclear rises are later in yes/no questions (L*+H) than in narrow focus statements (L+H*). Also, the H target is later in closed syllable items than in open syllable ones. In three identification tasks, we found that, when stimuli are ambiguous between questions and statements, listeners exploit the information on the precise...

Recent studies have investigated phonetic and phonological direct dialect imitation in intonation, though no study has yet explored metrical convergence. In this study we therefore test the assumption that speakers of standard French can mimic the metrical properties of a Southern French variety, having a different foot structure, by inserting a sc...

Speakers show phonetic differences while producing the very same utterance. These speaker-specific differences occur at various linguistic levels and they can be realized phonetically by many parameters such as voice quality, speech rate, loudness, fundamental frequency, breathing, articulatory behavior, etc. At the same time, listeners can vary in...

The aim of this study was to test whether both phonetic and phonological representations of intonation can be rapidly modified when imitating utterances belonging to a different regional variety of the same language. Our main hypothesis was that tonal alignment, just as other phonetic features of speech, would be rapidly modified by Italian speaker...

This work investigates the relationships among between thoracic volume changes, measured via Respitrace, subglottal pressure variation, and sentence stress in ten speakers of German. The plateau of the intraoral pressure (Pio) during productions of /t/ in target words, measured via a pressure transducer on the palate, was taken as an indication of...

German questions and statements are distinguished not only by lexical and syntactic but also by intonational means. This study revisits, for Northern Standard German, how questions are signalled intonationally in utterances that have neither lexical nor syntactic cues. Starting from natural productions of such 'intonation questions', two perception...

In this paper, we will compare prosodic and pragmatic approaches to the role of constituent length in attachment ambiguities. Lengthening a constituent affects its informativity: longer constituents are usually less predictable (Levy & Florian, 2007) and demand a higher processing load than shorter ones (Almor, 1999). Following neo-Gricean accounts...

This study investigates prosodic planning in a reading task in German. We analyze how the utterance length and syntactic complexity of an upcoming sentence affect two acoustic parameters (pause duration and the initial fundamental frequency peak) and two respiratory parameters (inhalation depth and inhalation duration). Two experiments were carried...

Most research on tune meaning has focussed on the contribution of the nuclear configuration (composed of nuclear accent, phrase accent and boundary tone), while the meaning contribution of the prenuclear contour (i.e., the intonational region preceding the nuclear accent) is still understudied. In Neapolitan Italian, differences in early (L+H*) vs....

It has recently been suggested that speakers vary in the amount of speech planning and that the scope of planning is influenced by task- and speaker specific constraints. To test this, an experiment is presented examining the effects of linguistic structure and working memory on speech planning, as evidenced in pause duration and F0 peaks. Twenty s...

It has recently been suggested that speakers vary in the amount of speech planning they do and that the scope of planning is influenced by task and speaker specific constraints. To test this, an experiment is presented examining the effects of linguistic structure and working memory on speech planning, as evidenced in pause duration and F0 peaks. T...

Tonal target detection is a very difficult task, especially in presence of consonantal perturbations. Though different detection methods have been adopted in tonal alignment research, we still do not know which is the most reliable. In our paper, we found that such methodological choices have serious theoretical implications. Interpretation of the...

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of tonal alignment in Italian variety spoken in Naples. We focused on the effects of intonation in the perception of minimal pairs contrasting in consonant duration. Spectrographic analyses show that the timing of pitch accent varies with the syllable structure (see also [1]). In open syllable (CV), the...

In a production experiment, we investigated sentence-domain effects on the alignment of Italian accents, and found that the nuclear peak is aligned earlier in long sentences than in short sentences. These findings are superficially contrary to traditional "time-pressure" explanations for variability in tonal alignment and raise some questions about...

In acoustic work on tonal alignment, tonal targets are often defined as visible f0 minima and maxima within the f0 contour. However, such targets might be difficult to detect either because they are masked by segmental perturbations or because they are not realized as sharp f0 turning points (ie, in plateau configurations). Automatic procedures of...

In this paper, we report on some acoustic data suggesting the existence of the Accentual Phrase (AP) in Neapolitan Italian. In late narrow focus utterances in which intonation modality was varied, there was a difference in the shape and slope of the interaccentual region linking the H target of the prenuclear rise with the L target of the following...

Acoustic work on tonal alignment has suggested that the temporal location of tonal targets relative to segmental "anchors" might be systematic (Arvaniti et al., 1998; Ladd et al. 1999, inter alia). However, tonal alignment is also sensitive to many phonetic and phonological factors (Silverman and Pierrehumbert, 1990; van Santen and Hirschberg, 1994...

Analysing the tune meaning is often equivalent to analysing the meaning contribution of the "nucleus" (the intonation region starting from the last pitch accented syllable until the end of the intonation phrase). In this paper we report results from an iden-tification task in Cosenza Italian, suggesting that listeners are able to identify the contr...

Many languages are able to signal questions and statements solely on an intonational basis. For ex-ample, German and Neapolitan Italian can differentiate yes/no questions from statements by the ut-terance-final intonation that starts at the nuclearly accented syllable. However, while the distinction between yes/no questions and statements is indica...