Noël Nguyen

• PhD
• Professor at Aix-Marseille University

The mental production of speech or "inner speech" is a remarkable and foundational ability in humans, involved in many daily activities such as reading, writing, remembering, or planning. Inner speech is generally accompanied by a subjective multisensory (mainly auditory) experience. However, the cognitive processes leading to these sensory percept...

The present study aimed to assess the extent to which human participants co-represent the lexico-semantic processing of a humanoid robot partner. Specifically, we investigated whether participants would engage their speech production system to predict the robot’s upcoming words, and how they would progressively adapt to the robot’s verbal behavior....

We present a novel experimental design that combines highly accurate psychometric methods with an interactive task to characterize how two or more listeners can converge towards each other in the categorization of speech sounds. The design is implemented as a cooperative game, in which listeners are presented with a sequence of sounds that range on...

The mental production of speech or "inner speech" is a remarkable and foundational ability in humans, involved in many activities such as reading, writing, planning, or remembering. Inner speech is generally accompanied by a subjective multisensory (mainly auditory) experience. However, the cognitive and neural processes leading to these sensory pe...

This study focuses on inter-individual convergence effects in the perception and categorization of speech sounds. We ask to what extent two listeners can come to establish a shared set of categorization criteria in a phoneme identification task that they accomplish together. Several hypotheses are laid out in the framework of a Bayesian model of sp...

The dynamic deployment of talk-in-interaction has been studied mainly from the perspective of collaboration and/or convergence. In both linguistics and psycholinguistics, the authors have mainly tried to show that due to a strong predictability (psycholinguistics) or projection/projectability (Conversational Analysis, Interactional Linguistics) of...

This chapter deals with the linguistic manifestations of conversation. For a long time, linguists have been interested in the levels of oral language (phonology, lexicon, syntax, discourse) separately, particularly based on prepared and non-interactive speech corpora. Research on conversational speech highlights what modern linguistic theories seek...

In this study we investigated whether people conceptually align when performing a language task together with a robot. In a joint picture-naming task, 24 French native speakers took turns with a robot in naming images of objects belonging to fifteen different semantic categories. For a subset of those semantic categories, the robot was programmed t...

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...

In this study, we focused on the rime priming effect and examined whether the frequency of rimes influences the size of the effect. Using the lexical decision task, we observed that the rime priming effect interacted with rime frequency with a stronger priming effect when the target words contained low-frequency rimes, in comparison to target words...

Conversation entails a tight coordination between the interlocutors in terms of co-representation and linguistic alignment (e.g., word choices). In this study we investigated whether people conceptually align in a language task with a robot. 24 French native speakers alternated with an artificial partner in naming images of objects belonging to dif...

This study focuses on the recognition of the voicing-feature in whispered speech. Our previous works (Dufour & Meynadier 2019) show a later recognition of the feature [+voiced] probably based on a pre-lexical processing of acoustic information, other than the laryngeal vibration, extracted from the whispered signal and used in lexical access. Via a...

Interplay between duration and word position in voicing perception of whispered fricatives - This study focuses on the recognition of the voicing-feature in whispered speech. Our previous works (Dufour & Meynadier 2019) show a later recognition of the feature [+voiced] probably based on a pre-lexical processing of acoustic information, other than t...

Recent research on speech communication has revealed a tendency for speakers to imitate at least some of the characteristics of their interlocutor’s speech sound shape. This phenomenon, referred to as phonetic convergence, entails a moment-to-moment adaptation of the speaker’s speech targets to the perceived interlocutor’s speech. It is thought to...

This study examines ERP correlates of the different processes associating two phones to one vs. two phonemic categories in two regional varieties of French. Two groups of French listeners are compared, respectively exploiting two regional varieties, with a contrast between the mid-low /ϵ/ and the mid-high /e/ for Northern French (NF) but not for So...

In two semantic priming experiments, this study examined how southern French speakers process the standard French [o] variant in closed syllables in comparison to their own variant [ɔ]. In Experiment 1, southern French speakers showed facilitation in the processing of the associated target word VIOLET whether the word prime mauve was pronounced by...

During a conversation, the neural processes supporting speech production and perception overlap in time and, based on context, expectations and the dynamics of interaction, they are also continuously modulated in real time. Recently, the growing interest in the neural dynamics underlying interactive tasks, in particular in the language domain, has...

Paper presented at Phonetics and Phonology in Europe (PaPE) 2017

Paper presented at Abstraction, Diversity, and Speech Dynamics

Paper presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea

In this study, we examined whether the lexical competition process embraced by most models of spoken word recognition is sensitive to talker-specific information. We used a lexical decision task and a long lag priming experiment in which primes and targets sharing all phonemes except the last one (e.g., /bagaR/“fight” vs. /bagaƷ/“luggage”) were pre...

This study examined whether the ability of southern French speakers to discriminate between standard French word forms such as /pike/ and /pikε/ can be improved by a training procedure in which participants were exposed to the orthographic representations of words forming /e/-/ε/ minimal pairs. The results of the training procedure showed that sout...

This book examines the variation found in modern spoken French, based on the research programme ‘Phonology of Contemporary French’ (Phonologie du Français Contemporain, PFC). Extensive data are drawn from around the French-speaking world, including Algeria, Canada, Louisiana, Mauritius, and Switzerland. Although the principal focus is on difference...

Current studies in phonological and phonetic variation make an ever increasing use of large oral corpora such as the one developed in the framework of the Phonologie du français contemporain project. The exploitation of these large-scale corpora has fostered the development of powerful techniques for the processing and analysis of speech data. Thes...

Paper presented at the 5th Young Linguists' Meeting in Poznań

The issue we address in this review paper is to what extent mutual adaptation plays a role in the emergence and evolution of phonological systems.Adaptation to the interlocutor has been shown to take many forms and to embrace all the levels of spoken language, from adjustments in vocal intensity to changes in word forms over the course of a convers...

One particularity of the Mauritian Creole language is that there is no contrastive distinction between the consonants /s/ and /ʃ/, which are both pronounced /s/ in Creole. In this study, we examined the identification performance of the /s/-/ʃ/ contrast by Mauritian Creole-French bilinguals who have been exposed to French before 7 years of age, and...

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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...

Auditory and somatosensory systems play a key role in speech motor control. In the act of speaking, segmental speech movements are programmed to reach phonemic sensory goals, which in turn are used to estimate actual sensory feedback in order to further control production. The adult's tendency to automatically imitate a number of acoustic-phonetic...

Phonetic imitation, also called phonetic convergence, is currently at the heart of numerous investigations since it can inform us on both the nature of lexical representations and the link between production and perception processes in spoken language communication. A task that has been largely used to study phonetic imitation is the shadowing task...

Speech imitation appears to be one of the most fundamental aspects of human vocal behavior. It has been suggested that it plays an important role in speech development and may also form one of the key mechanisms that underlie the emergence and evolution of human languages. Starting early on, infants appear to be matching the prosodic and micro-pros...

Ce chapitre décrit les méthode actuelles d'analyse et de traitement du signal de parole. Les méthodes de segmentation manuelle du signal de parole y sont détaillées.

We asked to what extent phonetic convergence across speakers may facilitate later word recognition. Northern-French participants showed both a clear phonetic convergence effect toward Southern French in a word repetition task, and a bias toward the phonemic system of their own variety in the recognition of single words. Perceptual adaptation to a n...

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 goal of this paper is to present EMATOOLS, a set of scripts for displaying and annotating acoustic and articulatory data simultaneously in studies on speech production. These scripts were developed with the use of MATLAB, a multiplatform computing environment for numeric computation and visualization. The system is equipped with a mouse-driven...

This combined ERP and behavioral experiment explores the dynamics of processing during the discrimination of vowels in a non-native regional variety. Southern listeners were presented with three word forms, two of which are encountered in both Standard and Southern French ([kot] and [kut]), whereas the third one exists in Standard but not Southern...

French accentual phrases (APs) are characterized by the presence of a typical final fo rise (LH*) and an optional/additional initial fo rise (LHi). This study tested whether between-speaker speech imitation influenced the realization of APs tonal patterns. The experiment was based on APs containing a function word plus a bisyllabic content word, wh...

The history of research on speech perception and speech production is replete with examples of nonlinearities between articulation and acoustics, and between acoustics and perception. These nonlinearities are useful for communication. They allow 1) adequate production of speech sounds and words despite people having different vocal tracts with diff...

Unintentional imitation is one of the major processes by which humans smooth social interactions. Such convergent behaviors also occur during speech communication, as highlighted by our tendency to automatically 'imitate' a number of phonetic characteristics in another speaker's speech. This phonetic convergence effect is thought to facilitate conv...

This study aimed at investigating the effects of acoustic distance and of speaker variability on the pre-attentive and attentive perception of French vowels by French adult speakers. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants watched a silent movie (Passive condition) and discriminated deviant vowels (Active condition). The audi...

Southern French listeners were trained on the word final Standard French /e/-/epsilon/ contrast that does not exist in their dialect. They learned to associate minimal pairs of new words with visual shapes. Although final training session performance was relatively high, the learning did not transfer to a lexical decision task with phonological pri...

One key aspect of face-to-face communication concerns the differences that may exist between speakers’ native regional accents. This paper focuses on the characterization of regional phonological variation in a conversational setting. A new, interactive task was designed in which 12 pairs of participants engaged in a collaborative game leading them...

Dans cette étude, nous avons entrainé des auditeurs du Sud de la France à discriminer entre les voyelles /e/ et /epsilon/ et nous avons examiné si oui ou non, cet apprentissage se transfert à la reconnaissance des mots contenant les voyelles critiques /e/ et /epsilon/.

Dans cette étude, nous avons examiné si le fait d'imiter un accent non-natif facilite la reconnaissance des mots dans cet accent.

Dans cette étude, nous avons examiné l'impact d'un changement de voix sur le processus de reconnaissance des mots parlés.

Time is essential to speech. The duration of speech segments plays a critical role in the perceptual identification of these segments, and therefore in that of spoken words. Here, using a French word identification task, we show that vowels are perceived as shorter when attention is divided between two tasks, as compared to a single task control co...

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the impact of phonological variation resulting from a vowel merger on phoneme perception. The perception of the /e/-/epsilon/ contrast which does not exist in Southern French-speaking regions, and which is in the process of merging in Northern French-speaking regions, was compared to the /ø/-/y/ con...

Much research has been devoted to exploring the representations and pro- cesses employed by listeners in the perception of speech. There is in that domain a longstanding debate between two opposite approaches. Abstrac- tionist models, on the one hand, are based on the assumption that an abstract and speaker-independent phonological representation i...

Studies in the field of psycholinguistics and cognitive neurosciences have allowed us to learn a great deal about the mechanisms underlying speech sound perception. In this paper, we present a selective but hopefully representative review of research on speech perception. Specifically, this review shows that during the first year of life, the liste...

This contribution relates to the project "La Phonologie du Francais Contemporain" (PFC), the largest and most ambitious survey of modern French ever conceived. The PFC project involves over thirty researchers from a variety of countries and aims at the recording, partial transcription and phonetic analysis of over 600 speakers from the francophone...

The dynamical system view of speech perception assumes that speech categorization depends on both the acoustic properties of the incoming sound and the state of the perceptual system (indexed by the subject's responses to preceding sounds). Tuller and colleagues [1] systematically manipulated the order of presentation of stimuli from a "say"-"stay"...

This paper examines acoustic aspects of vowel harmony (VH), understood as regressive vowel-to-vowel assimilation, in two regional varieties of French in six speakers' productions of 107 disyllabic word pairs. In each word pair, the word-initial vowel (V1) was phonemically either /e/ or /o/, and the word-final stressed vowel (V2) alternated between...

Automatic speech processing methods and tools can contribute to shedding light on many issues relating to phonemic variability in speech. The processing of huge amounts of speech thus allows to extract main tendencies, for which detailed interpretations then require both linguistic and methodological insights. The experimental study focuses on the...

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Les études en psycholinguistique et en neurosciences cognitives ont permis de grandes avancées quant à la compréhension des mécanismes impliqués dans la perception des sons de parole. Nous présentons une revue sélective que nous espérons représentative des recherches sur la perception de la parole. Plus particulièrement, les recherches présentées m...

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...

This study examined the impact on speech processing of regional phonetic/phonological variation in the listener's native language. The perception of the /e/-/epsilon/ and /o/-/upside down c/ contrasts, produced by standard but not southern French native speakers, was investigated in these two populations. A repetition priming experiment showed that...

Nous proposons un état des lieux, à la fois dans les interrogations actuelles que soulève la rencontre des deux disciplines et dans l'histoire de leurs relations, depuis les propositions fondatrices de Troubetzkoy jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Il se conclut par une réflexion sur le défi que constitue pour la mathématique la confrontation à un objet qui lui...

Nous proposons un état des lieux, à la fois dans les interrogations actuelles que soulève la rencontre des deux disciplines et dans l'histoire de leurs relations, depuis les propositions fondatrices de Troubetzkoy jusqu'à aujourd'hui. Il se conclut par une réflexion sur le défi que constitue pour la mathématique la confrontation à un objet qui lui...

Tonal alignment work has suggested that the temporal location of tonal targets relative to segmental "anchors" might be governed by principles of synchrony and stability (Arvaniti et al 1998, Ladd et al. 1999, inter alia). However, a number of discrepancies have emerged in the cross-linguistic study of alignment. For instance, despite some regulari...

The goal of the present study is to better understand the mechanisms involved in the processing of liaison consonants by listeners in French. Previous work (Wauquier-Gravelines 1996) showed that liaison consonants are more difficult to detect than word-initial consonants in a phoneme-detection task. We examined to what extent such differences are a...

Perceptual categories built up in the identification of speech sounds remain highly plastic in adults and continuously evolve along a wide range of time scales. Tuller and colleagues [1,2] accounted for this plasticity using a non-linear dynamical model in which perceptual categories are associated with attractors of a potential function. In this m...

Ce chapitre a pour objectif de présenter un aperçu général des recherches sur la perception de la parole, dans leur relation avec la phonétique et la phonologie. Nous commençons par exposer les travaux visant à explorer les processus employés dans l'identification des phonèmes. Nous abordons ensuite les questions relatives à la forme et à la foncti...

This study is concerned with the perceptual relevance of regressive vowel harmony in French. Two experiments were conducted. The first experiment showed that acoustic variations in a non-final vowel depending on the final vowel can be detected by listeners. The second experiment revealed that vowel harmony can facilitate the identification of the f...

Properties of syllable onset /l/ that depend on the voicing of the syllable coda were measured for four speakers, representing different nonrhotic British English accents that differ in their phonetic realization of onset /l/ and in their system of phonological contrast involving onset /l/ and /r/. Onset /l/ was longer before voiced than voiceless...

L'objectif général de ce travail est de procéder à une analyse acoustique détaillée des voyelles du français à partir des enregistrements réalisés dans le cadre du projet PFC. Il vise à caractériser la structure acoustique des voyelles et à établir des comparaisons dans ce domaine entre les systèmes vocaliques relatifs à différents points d'enquête...

In studies of speech perception, temporal integration refers to how chunks of information arriving at the ears at different times are linked together by the listener in mapping speech sounds onto meaning. Classical models focused on the perceptual grouping of acoustic cues contained in short stretches of time in the identification of phonetic segme...

Over the last few years, much attention has been dedicated to exploring the neural and cognitive underpinnings of learning disabilities in reading. Such an interest is partly due to the major socio-economic impact of these disabilities, which are estimated to affect 3-9% of school-age children and adults. The growing body of research in that domain...

This paper presents the preliminary results of an acoustic study, and a review of previous work on vowel harmony in French. It shows that harmony, initially regarded as regular sound change, is considered an optional constraint on the distribution of mid vowels. Acoustic evidence of anticipatory assimilation of pretonic mid vowels to tonic high and...

The deficit in the perception of speech shown by dyslexic children, compared to control children, has been sometimes accounted for by assuming that acoustic information is integrated over a longer time window in dyslexics. Short and fast-varying acoustic cues would therefore be more difficult to detect, and this process would be more likely to be d...