Fabian SantiagoUniversité de Vincennes - Paris 8 | UP8 · UFR Sciences du Langage (SDL)
Fabian Santiago
PhD in Linguistics (Experimental Phonology)
Assistant Professor at the University of Paris 8
About
48
Publications
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129
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
I am an Assistant Professor ('Maître de Conférence') at the University Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis (UFR Sciences du Langage). I am associated to the lab Structures Formelles du Langage (UMR 7023, CNRS & Paris 8). My research focuses on: L2 Phonetics, L2 Prosody, Second Language Acquisition.
Website: https://sites.google.com/site/fsantiagovargas/
Additional affiliations
September 2016 - present
December 2014 - August 2016
January 2013 - December 2014
Université Paris Cité
Position
- Research Assistant
Education
January 2011 - November 2014
Publications
Publications (48)
We analyse articulation rate and speech rate, number and duration of pauses for 22 speakers of two Spanish regional varieties (Madrilenian vs Mexican) in three different tasks (read speech, picture description and interview). Our results show that speakers from Madrid have higher articulation rate and speech rate than speakers from Mexico, but that...
In this study, we examined to what extent cross-linguistic influence is observed in the production of unstressed vowels in Mexican learners of L2 English and L3 Russian. Phonological spectral vowel reduction is a widespread process present, in contrast to Spanish, in both English and Russian. In total, 18 Mexican learners, 6 American speakers, 5 Ru...
Training L2 suprasegmental features benefits pronunciation accuracy and comprehensibility, especially through the use of hand gestures. However, studies have mainly looked at the effect of prosodic training in controlled tasks and less is known about spontaneous speech. The present study explores the effect of prosodic training with and without ges...
Mainstream L2 phonology models do not include predictions concerning how the prosodic structure interacts with the acquisition of segments. However, many studies have shown that the realization of pitch accents or melodic contours associated to prosodic boundaries results in the hyper- articulation of segments in correspondence of such prosodic bou...
Marking information structure in L2 speech is often challenging for learners: information structure interacts with prosody, syntax and discourse in a complex way. Additionally, linguistic means used to encode information structure are often language-specific. We analyse the strategies used in the expression of narrow focus in the elicited speech of...
Les recherches examinant les interactions entre la structure prosodique et la phonétique en français L1 ont montré que les segments (consonnes et voyelles) sont hyper-articulés selon leur position dans la hiérarchie prosodique où ils sont produits. Par exemple, certains traits phonologiques des segments produits en syllabe accentuée sont renforcés...
This study deals with the expression of additive linking in L2 French by adult German learners with two proficiency levels (advanced vs. intermediate). We examine whether crosslinguistic influences are observed in three domains: the frequency and type of additive expressions in discourse, the syntactic integration of additive particles in the utter...
Measures of second language (L2) learners' vocabulary size have been shown to correlate with language proficiency in reading, writing and listening skills, and vocabulary tests are sometimes used for placement purposes. However, the relation between learners' vocabulary knowledge and their speaking skills has been less thoroughly investigated, and...
In recent years there has been growing evidence that measures of vocabulary size are good predictors of L2 competence, and vocabulary tests are therefore often used as a quick evaluation of L2 proficiency level. However, evidence about the correlation between vocabulary size and speaking skills is scant, and the only existing studies investigating...
We examine the effects of prosodic strengthening on the acoustic realization of L2 French oral vowels. We analyse 12,283 vowels produced by 20 learners of French (L1 Spanish and English) and 10 native speakers according to different prosodic positions: (i) IP-final (ii) AP-final (obligatory accent) or AP-initial (initial non-obligatory accent) and...
Nous discutons de l’importance d'intégrer les résultats des recherches récentes en matière de prosodie et d'intonation dans l'élaboration des descriptions de référence actuelles et contextualisées destinées à l'enseignement du français L2. Nous nous focalisons sur la nature du groupe accentuel, ses rapports avec le phrasé prosodique et le rôle des...
Corpora of prepared speech were compared between two Romance languages: French and Spanish. Results of this comparison show that owing to its presence of lexical stress—itself involving acoustic strengthening—Spanish, in contrast to French, reveals acoustic strengthening with word-final lengthening. However, acoustic variations due to other factors...
![Figure 1: Illustrations of Euclidean distances (A) [6], Polygon Area...](profile/Fabian-Santiago-2/publication/323702226/figure/fig1/AS:607080490741760@1521750676550/Illustrations-of-Euclidean-distances-A-6-Polygon-Area-B1-and-Convex-Hull-Area_Q320.jpg)
This paper investigates the effects of lexical stress on vowel durations, vowel space and vowel quality in Spanish. Data come from oral productions of 22 Spanish speakers (10 from Madrid and 12 from Mexico City) performing different tasks. As for durational cues, we found that vowel durations play a role as a cue of lexical stress. Interestingly, o...
This contribution introduces the most crucial findings of recent research in second language phonology, and then discusses the questions raised by the various contributions of this special issue. We focus on four main topics: (i) the role of speech perception in L2 phonology models and the L1 transfer, (ii) the perception of L2 prosodic phenomena,...
The role of orthography in adult L2 acquisition is well documented in the literature. Recent work has revealed that spelling can lead learners to produce phonological contrasts which do not exist in the target language, such as pseudo-geminate consonants in L2 English as produced by Italian speakers. In this contribution, we examine pseudo-geminate...
Nous étudions les effets de deux types de tâches (imitation vs lecture oralisée), le rôle de l'orthographe et le niveau de langue dans la prononciation du français L2 chez 27 étudiants hispanophones. Pour évaluer la prononciation en L2, nous analysons les distances de Levenshtein entre les transcriptions phonétiques de la forme canonique et celles...
We analyse the syntactic-prosodic mapping for analysing the formation of Accentual Phrases in French by using rich and large corpora of natural speech with semi-automatic methods. Our goal is twofold: (i) studying whether grammatical information is a good predictor for the formation of APs in French in natural speech and (ii) analyzing the contribu...
The Prosody of Intonational Phrases in L2 French: a Perception Study
This paper investigates how Spanish learners of L2 French evaluate various prosodic features associated to non-final Intonational Phrases (IPs) in L2 French. The main goal is to verify whether L2 French prosodic patterns that have been observed in Spanish learners' oral production...
Recent advances in continuous word representation have been successfully used in several natural language processing tasks. This paper focuses on error prediction in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs and proposes to investigate the use of continuous word representation (word embeddings) within a neural network architecture.
The main contri...
This study explores automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors from a syntax-
prosody mapping perspective. Our contribution is threefold: we propose (i) an ASR
error study according to French syntactic structures, (ii) a quantitative evaluation of
the syntax-prosody mapping in reference transcriptions (iii) a qualitative analysis
of syntax-prosody m...
This study compares durational measures of accented vs unaccented vowels for data of 5 languages (4 speakers per language read translations of the same passage). Results show clear cross-language differences: accented vowels in our data of British English are more marked in terms of duration than in data of Mexican Spanish and Parisian French (data...
Learners of L2 French, be they German or Spanish, produce an extra-rising melodic movement (T*HH%) at the right edge of non-final IPs, whereas French native speakers do not produce such form. From the analyses of a large data set extracted from a learner corpus, it appears that this non-native tonal pattern could not be attributed to an L1 transfer...
Here you will find exercises for teaching L2 French sounds to Spanish speakers. This material is reported in:
Santiago, F. (2012). La didactique de la phonétique de L2 et la perception auditive : vers une nouvelle approche. Synergies Mexique, 2, 57-70
Please, cite this article if you use these materials. Note that this article is written in Frenc...
Here you will find exercises for teaching L2 French sounds to Spanish speakers. This material is reported in:
Santiago, F. (2012). La didactique de la phonétique de L2 et la perception auditive : vers une nouvelle approche. Synergies Mexique, 2, 57-70
Please, cite this article if you use these materials. Note that this article is written in Frenc...
Here you will find the wav files reported in:
Santiago, F. (2012). La didactique de la phonétique de L2 et la perception auditive : vers une nouvelle approche. Synergies Mexique, 2, 57-70
Please, cite this article if you use these materials. Note that this article is written in French and is consecrated to Spanish Speakers studying L2 French (B1...
This paper is under preparation: Santiago, F. (in preparation). La prosodie des syntagmes intonatifs en français L2: une étude perceptive. Langages, Special Issue. This paper studies how L1 Spanish listeners evaluate different prosodic events associated to non-final Intonational Phrases (IPs) in L2 French. The main goal is to clarify whether the L2...
In this chapter, we analyze the final tunes and the prosodic structure observed in yes/no and whquestions in French as an L2 produced by Mexican Spanish learners. Our study consists in a crosscomparison of information-seeking interrogatives recorded in French and Mexican Spanish in various settings and produced by 15 Mexican learners of French...
La adquisición de la pronunciación de una segunda lengua (L2) es considerada una tarea difícil para estudiantes y profesores. Las ideas sobre cuáles son las causas de esta dificultad han cambiado según los tiempos, las teorías, los enfoques lingüísticos y las investigaciones en el área. La motivación principal de la presente obra es ayudar a los do...
Cette thèse est consacrée à l’acquisition de la prosodie en français L2 par des apprenants hispanophones adultes. Nous tentons de répondre à deux types d’interrogations : (i) se demander si la construction des règles prosodiques de l’interlangue repose sur un transfert de la L1 vers la L2 ; et (ii) évaluer dans quelle mesure d’autres mécanismes rel...
The aim of the paper is to present the results of a perception experiment in which native and non-native listeners were asked to rate the appropriateness of resynthesized questions varying in respect to two aspects: their morphosyntactic structure (presence/absence of an interrogative marker) and the form of their final intonational contour (fallin...
This paper focuses on the acquisition of continuation rises in French by Mexican Spanish learners. The study consisted of a cross-comparison between native and non-native productions of 15 Mexican learners of French, 10 French speakers and 10 Mexican Spanish speakers. We analyzed the different rising contours obtained at the end of 502 non-final pr...
This paper focuses on the acquisition of the tonal and prosodic structure of questions in French as a L2. Our study consists in a cross-comparison of utterances recorded in French and Spanish in various settings, and produced by 15 Mexican Spanish learners of French (L2), 10 French speakers and 10 Mexican speakers. In the yes-no questions as produc...
Assigning a prosodic transcription that encompasses all prosodic phenomena (intonation, accentuation and phrasing) is difficult mainly because: (i) encoding all the prosodic phenomena usually supposes a knowledge of the language to transcribe; and (ii) a representation of the various phenomena cannot be achieved without taking into account the thre...
In this paper, we propose a study of the final contours and the prosodic structure observed in yes-no questions in French as an L2. Our study consists in a cross-comparison of utterances recorded in French and Spanish in various settings, and produced by 15 Mexican Spanish learners of French (L2), 10 French speakers and 10 Mexican speakers. In the...
Assigning a prosodic transcription that encompasses all prosodic phenomena (intonation, accentuation and phrasing) is difficult mainly because: (i) encoding all the prosodic phenomena usually supposes a knowledge of the language to transcribe; and (ii) a representation of the various phenomena cannot be achieved without taking into account the thre...
Pendant les dernières années, les recherches en acquisition de la phonétique et la phonologie en L2 ont souligné la forte relation entre la perception auditive, le développement du système phonologique et la prononciation en L2. Bien que reconnue comme une étape essentielle pour améliorer la prononciation des sons d’une L2, des approches basées sur...
Background: The study presented here aims at proposing a phonological analysis of rises in French, focusing on rises occurring at the end of yes/no neutral questions. In French intonation, rising movements are usually seen as playing a major role. However, two points concerning the status and the form of these movements are still under debate: (i)...
This paper reviews the oral production's intonation of French interrogative phrases uttered by native Hispanic speakers. The corpus comes from a reading test and a role play of 30 undergraduate students. The prosodic parameters analyzed are circumscribed to the Autosegmental-Metrical Model. The results confirm that the production of similar tonal a...
Questions
Questions (2)
The acquisition of L2 Prosody (intonation, accentuation, rhythm, etc.) and L2 segmentals (consonants and vowels) has been studied separately in most of studies. Few studies have examined the relation between L2 Prosody and L2 segmentals. For instance (as far as I know), no studies have reported whether prosody (via the production of accented syllables or boundary tones) has a positive/negative effect on L2 vowels' accuracy. It seems that this is not the case in L1: some studies have shown that producing stressed syllables facilitates the production of complex syllable structures. I am looking for recent studies dealing with the effects of prosody (metrical prominence) on the acquisition of L2 segmentals. If you know some studies focusing on this topic, please share these references: I would be more than happy!
I am looking for recent work dealing with the relation between accentual/metrical patterns and acoustic strengthening in Spanish (Castilian or Mexican). Particularly I would like to find some research analyzing the relation between the acoustic realization of Spanish vowels and the prosodic structure. References for other languages are welcome as well. Thanks.
