Corine Astésano

University of Toulouse, France · Laboratoire de NeuroPsychoLinguistique

Corine Astésano & Roxane Bertrand: Stress and prosodic constituency in French: issues in phonology and speech processing This article discusses the prosodic characteristics of French, in light of a metrical and perceptual analysis of various speaking styles. Our results lead us to propose the level of the prosodic word (pw) as the basic level of re...

This Event-Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates the use of prosodic information in the process of lexical access in French. In French, accentuation is said to be post-lexical, with a primary final accent (FA) and secondary initial accent (IA) marking the edges of the phrase. Results from previous studies, however, suggest IA may hold a demar...

The aim of this paper is to investigate prosodic phrasing and more precisely the use of prosodic cues in the marking of morphosyntactic units in French. As a first step towards this goal, a perception study was conducted on 27 listeners, who had to perform 3 distinct perceptual tasks on 32 syntactically controlled phrases read by a female speaker:...

In addition to the phrase-final accent (FA), the French phonological system includes a phonetically distinct Initial Accent (IA). The present study tested two proposals: that IA marks the onset of phonological phrases, and that it has an independent rhythmic function. Eight adult native speakers of French were instructed to read syntactically ambig...

Our main goal here is to explore the link between naïve listeners' perception of prominences and boundaries in spontaneous speech and experts' annotation of prosodic hierarchy and accentuation in French. We first present the design of our corpus, which consists in 133 utterances extracted from the Corpus of Interactional Data (CID). 73 naïve listen...

Infant-directed singing is a culturally universal musical phenomenon known to promote the bonding of infants and caregivers. Entrainment is a widely observed physical phenomenon by which diverse physical systems adjust rhythmic activity through interaction. Here we show that the simple act of infant-directed singing entrains infant social visual be...

Reliable fundamental frequency ( f 0 ) extraction algorithms are crucial in many fields of speech research. The current bulk of studies testing the robustness of different algorithms have focused on healthy speech and/or measurements of sustained vowels. Few studies have tested f 0 estimations in the context of pathological speech, and even fewer o...

French prosodic characteristics are particularly challenging for phonological theories. Despite a wide body of literature, some central issues are still discussed such as the existence of stress at the word level, the existence of one or two pitch accents and at which level of prosodic constituency they surface. Altogether, our results indicate tha...

French prosodic characteristics are particularly challenging for phonological theories. Our contribution aims at discussing some core issues in French prosodic phonology in the light of a series of results from production, perception and neuroimaging experiments. Altogether, our results not only question the notion of French listeners’ stress deafn...

Background: Speech disorders impact quality of life for patients treated with oral cavity and oropharynx cancers. However, there is a lack of uniform and applicable methods for measuring the impact on speech production after treatment in this tumor location. Objective: The objective of this work is to (1) model an automatic severity index of spe...

Within the framework of the Carcinologic Speech Severity Index (C2SI) INCa Project, we collected a large database of French speech recordings aiming at validating Disorder Severity Indexes. Such a database will be useful for measuring the impact of oral and pharyngeal cavity cancer on speech production. It will permit to assess patients Quality of...

French accentuation is held to belong to the level of the phrase. Consequently French is considered ‘a language without accent’ with speakers that are 'deaf to stress'. Recent ERP-studies investigating the French initial accent (IA) however demonstrate listeners not only discriminate between different stress patterns, but also expect words to be ma...

In French, accentuation is not lexically distinctive and tightly intertwined with intonation. This has led to the language being described of as 'a language without accent' and to French listeners being alleged 'deaf to stress'. However, if one considers Di Cristo's model in which the metrical structure of speech plays a central role, it becomes po...

Within the framework of the Carcinologic Speech Severity Index (C2SI) InCA Project, we collected a large database of French speech recordings aiming at validating Disorder Severity Indexes. Such a database will be useful for measuring the impact of oral and pharyngeal cavity cancer on speech production. That will permit to assess patients' Quality...

French accentuation is not lexically distinctive, contrary to most languages. It is traditionally viewed as a ‘language without accent’ [1] or primarily a boundary language [2], because phrase-final accent (hereafter ‘FA’) is co-occurrent to the boundary tone, which makes accent and boundary phonetically difficult to disentangle. In this view, into...

L'objectif de cette étude est d'explorer l'organisation du phrasé prosodique en français. Il n'existe pas de consensus clair sur le nombre de niveaux nécessaires pour refléter la hiérarchie prosodique de la langue. Dans ce cadre, nous proposons une étude perceptive, via un corpus de parole contrôlée manipulant des structures syntaxiques ambiguës, o...

Studies on professional impersonators and naïve speakers has underlined that speech imitation proficiency varies across speakers. Imitation in speech supposes that a speaker succeeds in reproducing specific features of the perceived speech. Because of the inherent variability of human speech behaviors, the question lies open whether different speak...

In this chapter, we summarize the main results of a line of research whereby a comparative approach to language and music is adopted in order to better understand the functional architecture of the human brain. Although the comparison between language and music has not been one of Jean-Luc Nespoulous' primary scientific interests, he has always bee...

This book brings together experts from the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience to explore how a multidisciplinary approach can impact on research into the neurocognition of language. International contributors present cutting-edge research from cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics and computer sc...

This paper introduces the Aix Map Task corpus, a corpus of audio and video recordings of task-oriented dialogues. It was modelled after the original HCRC Map Task corpus. Lexical material was designed for the analysis of speech and prosody, as described in Astésano et al. (2007). The design of the lexical material, the protocol and some basic quant...

This study investigates stress processing through the Event-Related brain Potential (ERP) technique. It aims at evaluating whether French listeners can perceive and discriminate the Initial Accent (IA) and whether IA is encoded in the phonological representation. Participants listened to trisyllabic words in two stress-pattern conditions, with (+IA...

The present investigation is a first step towards a larger description of French prosody and is primarily intended to account for the perception of prominence and boundary phenomena. French is traditionally described as a syllable-timed language, where the main accent (primary final accent, hereafter FA) is congruent to prosodic boundaries. Moreove...

This paper introduces the Aix MapTask corpus. This corpus was modelled after the original HCRC Maptask. Lexical mate-rial selection has been carefully crafted for speech and prosodic analysis [1]. We present the design of the lexical material, the protocol and basic quantitative facts about the existing corpus. We also describe an additional face-t...

This paper investigates boundary and prominence phenomena in French through a perception study, in order to go beyond the view that these phenomena are similar underlying phenomena in French. Our analyses focus on Final Accents (FA) and Initial Accents (IA) as right and left structure markers, and their relationship to the prosodic hierarchy. Our r...

The aim of the present study is to verify whether the visual cues located on the neck, can contribute in Mandarin tones visual perception. However, in an unexpected way, this study shows that tones can be read on the lips, even when the syllable is pronounced in the back of the oral cavity. It seems indeed on the one hand that the labial reading is...

Landau–Kleffner syndrome (LKS) is a rare childhood neurological disorder characterized by subacute aphasia, auditory agnosia and abnormal EEG. Prosody structures utterances, indicates sentence modality (linguistic prosody) and expresses the speaker’s intention, attitude and emotions (affective prosody). It not only functions as (para-) linguistic f...

The Multiphonia Corpus consists of audio-video classroom recordings comparing two methods of phonetic correction (the ‘traditional’ articulatory method, and the Verbo-Tonal Method) This database was created not only to remedy the crucial lack of information and pedagogical resources on teaching pronunciation but also to test the benefit of VTM on S...

The aim of the present study is to verify whether the visual cues located on the neck, can contribute in Mandarin tones visual perception. However, in an unexpected way, this study shows that tones can be read on the lips, even when the syllable is pronounced in the back of the oral cavity. It seems indeed on the one hand that the labial reading is...

This paper investigates boundary and prominence phenomena in French through a perception study, in order to go beyond the view that these phenomena are similar underlying phenomena in French. Our analyses focus on Final Accents (FA) and Initial Accents (IA) as right and left structure markers, and their relationship to the prosodic hierarchy. Our r...

This study investigates the positive influence of oral skills' training on reading abilities for learners of French as a foreign language. We hypothesize that teaching prosody, especially at an early stage of the learning process, will not only improve students' speech fluency and pronunciation skills, but also dramatically improve their strategies...

Example of stimulus pair in condition same word/different melody (W = M≠). (0.22 MB WAV)

Pairs of sung words in each of the four experimental conditions, in one list of the Latin Square design (the first author can be contacted to obtain the other three lists), with each trisyllabic French word and the 3-note melody on which it was sung (one note per syllable). The melodies are represented in standard MIDI codes, where: C4 = 60, C#4 =...

Example of stimulus pair in condition different word/same melody (W≠ M = ) (0.22 MB WAV)

Example of stimulus pair in condition different word/different melody (W≠ M≠). (0.22 MB WAV)

Example of stimulus pair in condition same word/same melody (W = M = ). (0.22 MB WAV)

Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processin...

Two fMRI experiments were conducted using song to investigate the domain specificity of linguistic and musical processing. In Experiment 1, participants listened to pairs of spoken words, "vocalise" (i.e., singing without words), and sung words while performing a same-different task. Results revealed bilateral involvement of middle and superior tem...

Cette étude pilote a pour but de caractériser quatre types de détachement à gauche en français.Alors que l'une des quatre constructions est clairement composée de 2 clauses (une clause étant définie comme une unité macro-syntaxique minimale), pour les trois autres le nombre de clauses, une ou deux , fait débat. Un ensemble de parametres prosodiques...

The present work investigates the relationship between semantic and prosodic (metric) processing in spoken language under 2 attentional conditions (semantic and metric tasks) by analyzing both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data. Participants listened to short sentences ending in semantically and/or metrically congruous or incongruous...

Highlighting relevant information in a discourse context is a major aim of spoken language communication. Prosodic cues such as focal prominences are used to fulfill this aim through the pragmatic function of prosody. To determine whether listeners make on-line use of focal prominences to build coherent representations of the informational structur...

In this paper we describe an interdisciplinary collaboration between phoneticians, acousticians and neuroscientists that led to a study of rhythm in music and language. In the first part of the paper we discuss general aspects of rhythm, with a short overview of some earlier studies on the cultural influences of linguistic rhythm on musical rhythm....

The present work is dedicated to contrastive focus in French. It is part of a collaboration between the INCM in Marseille, the CRISCO laboratory in Caen and the LPL in Aix. The present paper proposes an analysis of the acoustic realisation of contrastive focus in French, where both syllabic- and word-level features are investigated with regards to...

Cette étude décrit la réalisation d'un dispositif de stimulation auditive pour un imageur à résonnance magnétique fonctionelle de 3 Tesla. Le plus important probléme de ces systémes réside dans l'émission d'un niveau de bruit considérable au cours de son fonctionnement qui les rend quasi impossible à utiliser pour des études en stimulation auditive...

The present experiment was aimed at investigating the on-line processing of semantic and prosodic information. We recorded the Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to semantically and/or prosodically congruous and incongruous sentences that were presented aurally, to study the time course of semantic and prosodic processing, and to determine wheth...

Previous studies have proposed that, along with the final accent, the French phonological system includes an Initial Accent which has rhythmic functions. Descriptions of English prosody propose that an early accent marks Major Phonological Phrases. The present study investigates the structural and rhythmic functions of IA in French at various level...

Previous studies have proposed that the French phonological system includes an Initial Accent on lexical words, which has rhythmic functions. Descriptions of English prosody propose that phonological phrases may have an early accent as a boundary marker. We report results from a preliminary production experiment, which tested the structural and rhy...

Recent models of French accentuation hypothesize the existence of a Rhythmic Word Initial (RWI) accent distinct from emphatic or pragmatic (word-initial) accents. This paper presents acoustic correlates (f0 and duration) characterizing the RWI accent and also describes a perceptual investigation designed on the basis of these data. This investigati...

This paper presents a multilingual evaluation of the prosodic tools developped in Aix (Laboratoire Parole et Langage) in the framework of the MULTEXT project. These tools allow an automatic stylisation of the fundamental frequency curve as a sequence of target points (MOMEL), as well as a symbolic coding with the INTSINT system. The evaluation has...

This report describes the work carried out by three different groups (Laboratoire Parole et Langage, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France; Grup de Fonètica, Departament de Filologia Espanyola, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain; Department of Phonetics, Umeå University, Sweden) within task 4.6. (Speech Markup and Validation), devoted to assess the e...

The present experiment was aimed at testing the psychobiological validity of prosodic focus in French, using the Event-Related Potential method (ERPs). The brain electrical activity of 16 subjects was recorded while they listened to short dialogues (one question and one answer). Four conditions were created, in which the answers included pragmatica...

The present study aims at studying the relationship between rhythmic (lexical meter) and semantic processing under two attention tasks (semantic and rhythmic), using the Event-Related Potential (ERP) method. Participants listened to short sentences ended by trisyllabic semantically and/or rhythmically congruous or incongruous words. Preliminary res...

Thesis (doctoral)--Université Aix-Marseille I, 1999.