Emmanuel Ferragne- PhD - Habilitation
- Professor at Université Paris Cité
Emmanuel Ferragne
- PhD - Habilitation
- Professor at Université Paris Cité
About
92
Publications
23,102
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
603
Citations
Introduction
Current research interests: accent stereotypes (experimental sociophonetics); forensic voice comparison; how TV crime dramas influence our perception of forensic voice analysis; the sociophonetics of the singing voice; L2 phonetics and phonology (French learners of English); many other fascinating topics linked to articulatory and acoustic phonetics.
Techniques I use: articulatory MRI, EGG, EPG, EEG, ultrasound tongue imaging, skin conductance, deep learning, etc.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (92)
Cette étude analyse l’articulation des allophones clairs et sombres du /l/ de l’anglais par trois locuteurs francophones et une locutrice native d’anglais britannique. Nous examinons en imagerie par résonance magnétique si les apprenants développent un /l/ sombre (absent du français), avec plus de rétraction en coda qu’en attaque comme attendu en a...
Cet article s’inscrit dans la lignée de l’étude fondatrice de Trudgill sur la prononciation des chansons pop, dans laquelle il constate que certains artistes britanniques comme les Beatles ont tendance à chanter avec un accent que l’on pourrait qualifier d’américain. Avec le temps, cette influence explicite du modèle américain s'est inscrite comme...
People’s perception of forensic evidence is greatly influenced by crime TV series. The analysis of the human voice is no exception. However, unlike fingerprints—with which fiction and popular beliefs draw an incorrect parallel—the human voice varies according to many factors, can be altered deliberately, and its potential uniqueness has yet to be p...
Acquiring a consistent accent and targeting a native standard like Received Pronunciation (RP) or General American (GA) are prerequisites for French learners who plan to become English teachers in France. Reliable methods to assess learners’ productions are therefore extremely valuable. We recorded a little over 300 students from our English Studie...
English /r/ takes different tongue shapes from one speaker to another. It is well-established that tip-down and tip-up shapes produce perceptually similar outputs. However, it remains unclear why speakers intuitively acquire one type or another. The present study considers the hypothesis that rhotic and non-rhotic varieties of English may influence...
Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis that can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time....
Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time...
Recent empirical studies have highlighted the large degree of analytic flexibility in data analysis which can lead to substantially different conclusions based on the same data set. Thus, researchers have expressed their concerns that these researcher degrees of freedom might facilitate bias and can lead to claims that do not stand the test of time...
Our perception of someone's accent influences our expectations about what they might say or do. In this experiment, EEG data were recorded while participants listened to cliché sentences matching or not the stereotypes associated with the speaker's accent (upper-class Parisian accent or banlieue accent, a negatively connoted accent associated with...
Drawing from previous research showing that there may be articulatory constraints (on top of socio-cultural factors such as the attractiveness of the American music industry) influencing the Americanization of singing voice pronunciation of British artists (Caillol & Ferragne, 2019; Morrissey, 2008), we sought to determine if word duration and lexi...
Since scientists’ individual epistemological preferences infallibly shape the output of their research, this thesis starts with a presentation of the author’s position with respect to a number of methodological issues pertaining to the field of contemporary phonetics. Such concepts as corpora, experimental techniques, quantitative methods, and the...
Second language (L2) learners frequently encounter persistent difficulty in perceiving certain non-native sound contrasts, i.e., a phenomenon called “phonological deafness”. However, if extensive L2 experience leads to neuroplastic changes in the phonological system, then the capacity to discriminate non-native phonemic contrasts should progressive...
The secondary labial articulation which accompanies the post-alveolar approximant /r/ in English has attracted far less attention from linguists than the primary lingual one. However, the lips may be particularly important in the variety of English spoken in England, Anglo-English, because non-lingual labiodental articulations ([ʋ]) are on the rise...
Dans cette étude, nous avons demandé à 3 groupes d'étudiants en anglais (niveaux L1, L2 et L3) de lire un dialogue en anglais afin d'évaluer la possibilité d'une amélioration de leur production sur le plan du rythme en fonction de leur niveau universitaire. Le dialogue a également été lu par des anglophones, et une traduction du dialogue en françai...
Des étudiants en anglais étaient invités à lire trois types de phrases : assertions, questions fermées et ouvertes. Ils étaient ensuite soumis à 3 sessions d'entraînements où ils devaient répéter des phrases interrogatives prononcées par une anglophone. Après chaque phrase, leur contour de F0 sur la syllabe portant le noyau intonatif ainsi que celu...
My goal is to examine acoustic and perceptual data from various locations in the British Isles – Enniskillen (Ulster), Glasgow, and Hull – in order to better understand the production and perception of certain Derived Phonological Contrasts found in English. This research falls within a broader framework that I call the Gradient Phonemicity Hypothe...
This paper presents acoustic and articulatory data from prevocalic /r/ in the non-rhotic variety of English spoken in England, Anglo-English. Although traditional descriptions suggest that Anglo-English /r/ is produced using a tip-up tongue configuration, ultrasound data from 24 speakers show similar patterns of lingual variation to those reported...
Hearing swear words or taboo words causes us discomfort. Research suggests that emotional responses caused by such words are stronger when the words are spoken in the listener’s first language (L1), rather than their second language (L2). We attempt to replicate these findings with a perceptual experiment. French learners of English were asked to l...
Articulatory variation of /r/ has been widely observed in rhotic varieties of English, particularly with regards to tongue body shapes, which range from retroflex to bunched. However, little is known about the production of /r/ in modern non-rhotic varieties, particularly in Anglo-English. Although it is generally agreed that /r/ may be accompanied...
Objective:
Interference suppression and response inhibition are distinct effortful inhibitory processes. Yet they rely on partly overlapping neural substrates. Their independence was studied using an auditory paradigm.
Method:
Continuous EEG was recorded in 16 adults and event-related potentials (ERPs) were analyzed in a new dichotic listening -...
A deep convolutional neural network was trained to classify 45 speakers based on spectrograms of their productions of the French vowel /˜A/. Although the model achieved fairly high accuracy-over 85 %-our primary focus here was phonetic interpretability rather than sheer performance. In order to better understand what kind of representations were le...
Broadband spectrograms of French vowels /˜A/, /a/, /E/, /e/, /i/, /@/, and /O/ extracted from radio broadcast corpora were used to recognize 45 speakers with a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The same network was also trained with 62 phonetic parameters to i) see if the resulting confusions were identical to those made by the CNN trained w...
Modern phonetics has relied, to a large extent, on researchers’ ability to extract patterns from visual representations of speech. In this respect, if linguists were medical doctors, phoneticians would be radiologists. Speaking of radiologists, recent progress in artificial intelligence has made it possible for certain deep learning algorithms to o...
Drawing from Trudgill's finding that some Ameri-can phonetic features are common in British pop-songs [14], this paper explores whether this principle applies to a genre as distinctly British (in its original form) as Heavy Metal. We worked on a database comprised of the full studio discography, and some isolated vocal tracks and interviews of two...
"Speech without lips: an acoustic and articulatory study":
This paper studies the use of a lip retractor as a potential technique for phonetic studies involving perturbation. This device is currently used by participants of the internet sensation, the so-called “no lips” or “mouth guard” challenge. Wearing the device restricts the use of the lips...
Kurzfassung: In zwei Perzeptionsexperimenten wurde die Perzeption von Sprech-geschwindigkeit untersucht. Ein Faktor, der dabei besonders im Zentrum des In-teresses steht, ist Surprisal, ein informationstheoretisches Maß für die Vorhersag-barkeit einer linguistischen Einheit im Kontext. Zusammengenommen legen die Ergebnisse der Experimente den Schlu...
The possible transformation of the explicit knowledge developed during classroom learning of a second language into implicit knowledge of that language remains an open issue. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the explicit and implicit processing of morphosyntactic violations of English as an L2. ERP responses were obtained fro...
Second language learners frequently encounter difficulty in perceiving specific non-native sound contrasts. This phenomenon called phonological deafness rather occurs if the second language (L2) is learned after early childhood and is quite persistent even when high L2 proficiency is attained (Dupoux et al., 2008). However, if the neuronal underpin...
Adaptation to artificially time-compressed speech and natural fast speech has been previously shown in adult listeners, with significant improvement of performance within 5-10 sentences. In the present study, we investigated whether typically developing children also adapt to such variations in speech rate. Eighteen children performed a semantic ju...
The experimental investigation of response inhibition and the neuropsychological assessment of impulsivity are classically conducted with Go/Nogo tasks, where the participant presses a key for standard (Go) stimuli and withholds the response for deviant (Nogo) ones. However, auditory Go/Nogo tasks frequently fail to elicit the typical ERP correlate...
This book is a critical appraisal of recent developments in corpus linguistics for the analysis of written and spoken learner data. The twelve papers cover an introductory critical appraisal of learner corpus data compilation and development (section 1); issues in data compilation, annotation and exchangeability (section 2); automatic approaches to...
RESUME ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Nous avons examiné les corrélats électrophysiologiques de la sensibilité des auditeurs aux indices acoustiques fins en condition de variabilité intra-locuteur dans le but de tester la pertinence de tels indices durant le traitement de...
We assessed the Gradient Phonemicity Hypothesis by testing whether a duration-based derived contrast in Scottish English can be seen phonemic just as a contrast based on vowel quality. We examined the electrophysiological correlates of the perception of such contrasts in native Scottish and French speakers. Results revealed differences between the...
This paper reports on ongoing experiments related to the perception of atypical phonological contrasts. It was hypothesized that the quasi-phonemic status of a derived contrast in Scottish English would induce atypical responses, yielding behavioural correlates with intermediate values between phonemicity and allophony. The results show that some o...
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...
In order to recognize spoken words, listeners must map sensory information from the acoustic input onto stored lexical entries. Because the speech signal is continuous, listeners must segment the speech stream in order to recognize words. To accomplish the task of segmentation listeners use their tacit knowledge of a wide range of patterns in their...
This study examined the contribution of F1 and F2 alone on the perception of plosive consonants in a CV context. Applying a 3-Bark spectral integration the F2 frequency was corrected for effects of proximity either to F1 or to F3, i.e., was replaced by F2'. Subjects used a two-dimensional Method of Adjustment to select the F1 and F2 consonant onset...
We assessed language lateralization in 177 healthy 4- to 11-year-old children and adults and atypical asymmetries associated with unilateral epileptic foci in 18 children with benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS). Dichotic listening results revealed two indices of immature functional asymmetry when the focus was left-sided (BECTS-L)....
Dichotic listening experiments show a right-ear advantage (REA), reflecting a left-hemisphere (LH) dominance. However, we found a decrease in REA when the initial stop consonants of two simultaneous French CVC words differed in voicing rather than place of articulation (Experiment 1). This result suggests that the right hemisphere (RH) is more invo...
We illustrate how a high-dimension feature space typically used in speech technology can be adapted to the phonetic description of vowels in 13 accents of the British Isles. In a previous work (Ferragne & Pellegrino, 2010), we carried out a formant investigation of the vowel systems of the British Isles; due to erroneous formant estimation, two-thi...
Time reversal is often used in experimental studies on language perception and understanding, but little is known on its precise impact on speech sounds. Strikingly, some studies consider reversed speech chunks as "speech" stimuli lacking lexical information while others use them as "non speech" control conditions. The phonetic perception of revers...
This study is a formant-based investigation of the vowels of male speakers in 13 accents of the British Isles. It provides F1/F2 graphs (obtained with a semi-automatic method) which could be used as starting points for more thorough analyses. The article focuses on both phonetic realization and systemic phenomena, and it also provides detailed info...
This study aimed at characterizing the cognitive processes that come into play during speech-in-speech comprehension by examining lexical competitions between target speech and concurrent multi-talker babble. We investigated the effects of number of simultaneous talkers (2, 4, 6 or 8) and of the token frequency of the words that compose the babble...
The aim of this paper is to compare the rhythmic features of the accents of the British Isles. The first part focuses on the separability of 13 dialect classes using two-dimension representations that are common in the literature. We then introduce a new measure of speech rhythm based on intensity which enhances separability and leads to a 30.80 %...
The aim of this paper is to compare the rhythmic features of the accents of the British Isles. The first part focuses on the separability of 13 dialect classes using two-dimension representations that are common in the literature. We then introduce a new measure of speech rhythm based on intensity which enhances se- parability and leads to a 30,80...
![Frequency of [ADJ + N] + N patterns in the BNC](profile/Emmanuel-Ferragne/publication/286464247/figure/tbl1/AS:949321709154306@1603347341815/Frequency-of-ADJ-N-N-patterns-in-the-BNC_Q320.jpg)
![Stress patterns a) Adj ∼ N b ) [ A d j + N ] ∼ N](profile/Emmanuel-Ferragne/publication/286464247/figure/tbl4/AS:949321709154307@1603347341951/Stress-patterns-a-Adj-N-b-A-d-j-N-N_Q320.jpg)
Frequent Adjective + Noun sequences in the British National Corpus based on the most frequent 'central' adjectives were examined in their use as noun premodifiers and in other uses (predicative, adverbial, or with N being the head of a noun phrase). Hyphenated and non-hyphenated occurrences were taken into account. An investigation of the presence...
This contribution deals with the automatic identification of the dialects of the British Isles. Several methods based on the
linguistic study of dialect-specific vowel systems are proposed and compared using the Accents of the British Isles (ABI)
corpus. The first method examines differences in diphthongization for the face lexical set. Discriminat...
This study is a description of the monophthongs of East Anglia speech, an area in the south east of England. Formant measurements were computed on 11 vowels in /hVd/ contexts. The results are compared with those of previously published works on standard British English. Our findings highlight the similarities and differences between the two systems...
Speakers are able to produce speech at different intended rates when prompted to do so. The question addressed in the present research is to what degree different intended rate categories are perceptually relevant when objective measures of speech rate (e.g. syllables/second) are variable and to what degree listeners are able to identify intended s...
This paper is an attempt to characterize the vowel systems of the dialects of British English. We carried out a (semi-) automatic dialect identification procedure using (hVd) words. Our second aim was to examine to what extent the procedure allowed the description of vowel systems. The method yields approximately 90% correct identification, and we...
Cet article présente une approche moderne de la dialectologie à partir de l'étude phonétique d'un vaste corpus de dialectes d'anglais britannique. Nous décrivons en détail la méthode d'identification automatique des dialectes et exposons quelques pistes pour son utilisation à des fins descriptives.
![Figure 9: Biplot displaying first two PCA components of all [i a u]...](profile/Jalal-Al-Tamimi/publication/221489776/figure/fig1/AS:669552358739974@1536645130741/Biplot-displaying-first-two-PCA-components-of-all-i-a-u-distances-labelled-plain-lines_Q320.jpg)
The aim of this paper is to study the effect of the number of vowels a language has on the size of its vocalic space, in the production of speech from two Arabic dialects, Moroccan and Jordanian Arabic, and from French. 5 speakers per language (or dialect) recorded a list of vowels in 3 conditions: vowels were embedded in 1) Words, 2) Syllables, an...
This paper raises questions about the discrete or continuous nature of rhythm classes. Within this framework, our study investigates speech rhythm in the different Arabic dialects that have been constantly described as stress-timed compared with other languages belonging to different rhythm categories. Preliminary evidence from perceptual experimen...
The degree to which a given speaker of British English diphthongizes her/his vowels has been known for decades to be a good indicator of this speaker's dialectal origin: for instance, some Northern varieties tend to have variants perceived as monophthongs where Standard Southern English has a perceived diphthong in the word GOAT. A portion of the r...
This research seeks to establish an inventory of the suprasegmental acoustic cues that are relevant to the automatic typology and identification of the dialects of British English. Using evidence from traditional dialectology suggesting that the dialects of the British Isles exhibit differences at the suprasegmental level – and, in particular, in t...
Cette étude s'inscrit dans le cadre de nos travaux sur l'identification des dialectes de l'anglais des Iles Britanniques à partir de traits phonético- phonologiques. Il s'agit d'estimer dans quelle mesure la diphtongue de l'ensemble lexical FACE pourrait contribuer à un système de classification automatique des dialectes par la machine. A partir de...
The purpose of this paper is to consider the contribution o f prosody to d iscourse analysis in interaction by means of a concrete example, i.e., the analysis of bonjour, a French greeting. In this experiment, naïve subjects were made to listen to a series of French politeness formulae taken from real interactions and asked to evaluate the degree o...
Phonological length is generally thought not to be re-levant in Scottish English. However, some vowels are appreciably longer when followed by the past mor-pheme /d/ (instead of a tautomorphemic /d/), re-sulting in so-called 'derived contrasts'. Do derived contrasts qualify as full-fledged phonemic oppositions or should they be regarded as allophon...
