Pierre André Hallé

• PhD
• Principal Investigator at CNRS (Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique )

Cross-linguistic perception of Tashlhiyt singleton-geminate contrasts

We extend our previous work which examined the effect of first language (L1) on the perception of Tashlhiyt gemination by adding three groups of participants from Korean, Mandarin, and Mongolian backgrounds. Tashlhiyt permits gemination for all consonants in all word positions, whereas the incidence of gemination differs in the participants' L1s: t...

Listeners generally detect syllables faster than phonemes in overt speech. This “syllable advantage” holds robustly for utterance-initial CV vs. C targets [Segui et al., 1981 Segui, J., Frauenfelder, U., & Mehler, J. (1981). Phoneme monitoring, syllable monitoring and lexical access. British Journal of Psychology, 72(4), 471–477. https://doi.org/10...

The current study explores when and how infants' brains attune to the phonotactic constraints of their native language to achieve phonotactic repair.

In Shanghai Chinese as well as many other Wu dialects, breathy voice is a well-documented accompaniment of the low-register tone syllables with obstruent as well as sonorant onsets. But Shanghai Chinese is rapidly changing and the breathy voice associated with low-register tones tends to disappear in young speakers’ productions. In this study, we a...

This study investigates the relations between tone, voicing, and voice quality in modern Shanghai Chinese. In low tone syllables, word-initial obstruent onsets are traditionally described as voiceless and breathy, and sonorant onsets as voiced and breathy. Our study is based on acoustic and electroglottographic ( EGG ) data from speakers of two age...

Cette étude est motivée initialement par une question méthodologique : la validité des mesures de temps de dénomination d’image, très utilisés pour explorer les processus de planification de production de parole. Le temps de dénomination est le temps écoulé entre affichage de l’image et début acoustique de la réponse verbale. Dans cet article, nous...

Cette étude est motivée initialement par une question méthodologique : la validité des mesures de temps de dénomination d’image, très utilisés pour explorer les processus de planification de production de parole. Le temps de dénomination est le temps écoulé entre affichage de l’image et début acoustique de la réponse verbale. Dans cet article, nous...

In a discrimination experiment on several Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts, we find that French listeners encounter substantial difficulty compared to native speakers. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near ceiling level on all contrasts. French listeners perform better on final contrasts such as fit-fitt than initial contrasts suc...

This study investigates the perceptual aspect of voice quality in Shanghai Chinese. Previous studies show that breathy voice is a redundant feature of low tones, but tends to disappear in young speakers’ productions. Does this mean that voice quality is not playing any role in tone perception? To find this out, we conducted forced-choice identifica...

In this research we combine a cross-form word-picture visual masked priming procedure with an internal phoneme monitoring task to examine repetition priming effects. In this paradigm, participants have to respond to pictures whose names begin with a pre-specified target phoneme. This task unambiguously requires retrieving the word-form of the targe...

Tashlhiyt is famous for its particularly marked syllable structure. Unlike the majority of world languages, including some related Berber varieties, Tashlhiyt allows not only vowels but all consonants – including voiceless stops /t/, /k/ or /q/ – to be nuclei of a syllable (e.g., [tkmi] `she smoked' is analyzed as bisyllabic where the sequence [tk]...

Perceptual Evidence Tashlhiyt is claimed to allow any segment to be syllable peak (Dell & Elmedlaoui 1985, 2002; Boukous 1987; Ridouane2008): [l.sit] "putiton" [b.nu] "construct" [ʃʃt] "eatit" [tk.kst] "youtookoff" Twobasicconstraints: • S o n o r i t y -­‐‑ b a s e d c o n s t r a i n t s : hierarchize the types of segments thatmaybesyllablenuclei...

Picture naming is a highly popular task in language production research. In particular, the frequency effect obtained in picture naming is generally considered as the signature of lexical access in speech production. However, it is quite well established that picture naming is very sensitive to the phonetic properties of the word to be produced, im...

RÉSUMÉ La dénomination d'images est une procédure privilégiée pour l'étude de la production du langage. En particulier, l'effet de fréquence en dénomination a été considéré comme la signature de l'accès au lexique mental. Toutefois, en raison de sa nature articulatoire, la réponse de dénomination est très sensible aux propriétés phonétiques du mot...

Picture naming is a highly popular task in language production research. In particular, the frequency effect obtained in picture naming is generally considered as the signature of lexical access in speech production. However, it is quite well established that picture naming is very sensitive to the phonetic properties of the word to be produced, im...

French (or English) native listeners hear /kl/ when presented with the illegal consonant sequence */tl/. This robust case of perceptual repair is usually viewed as operating at a prelexical level of speech processing but the evidence against lexical feedback is somewhat weak. In this study, we report new data supporting the prelexical hypothesis, o...

Previous studies have reported phonetic characteristics of the Shanghai Chinese phonological voicing contrast, which cooccurs with a tonal contrast. In stressed word-initial position, phonetic voicing is neutralized and replaced with a tonal register contrast: high 'yin' tones for (phonologically) voiceless and low 'yang' tones for voiced obstruent...

Certain consonant/vowel (CV) combinations are more frequent than would be expected from the individual C and V frequencies alone, both in babbling and, to a lesser extent, in adult language, based on dictionary counts: Labial consonants co-occur with central vowels more often than chance would dictate; coronals co-occur with front vowels, and velar...

We review data and hypotheses dealing with the mental representations for perceived and produced speech that infants build and use over the course of learn-ing a language. In the early stages of speech perception and vocal production, before the emergence of a receptive or a productive lexicon, the dominant picture emerging from the literature sugg...

This work contributes to the issue of categoricity versus gradiency in natural assimilations. We focused on voice-assimilation in French and started from the assumption that the main cue to obstruent voicing is glottal pulsing. We quantified glottal pulsing continuously with a single acoustic measure -- the proportion in duration of voiced portion(...

From a representational viewpoint, the "voiced" series of obstruents in Shanghai dialect can be specified in terms of complementary, context-conditioned tonal and segmental features: either low tone or glottal pulsing. Yet, some studies have proposed that, when the "voiced" obstruents can only be signaled by low tone (stress-initially), they retain...

In a discrimination experiment on Tashlhiyt Berber singleton-geminate contrasts (i.e., duration contrasts), we find that French listeners are more sensitive to silent closure duration in word-final /t/ than to voiced murmur, or even, frication duration in initial position. Native listeners of Tashlhiyt perform near-ceiling on all these contrasts. W...

Distinctive features have long been involved in the study of spoken language, and in one form or another remain central to the study of phonological patterning within and across languages. However, their phonetic nature as well as their role in mental representation, speech production and speech processing has been a matter of less agreement. Many...

Cross-language differences in phonetic settings for phonological contrasts of stop voicing have posed a challenge for attempts to relate specific phonological features to specific phonetic details. We probe the phonetic-phonological relationship for voicing contrasts more broadly, analyzing in particular their relevance to nonnative speech percepti...

We examined the voice onset times (VOTs) of monolingual and bilingual speakers of English and French to address the question whether cross language phonetic influences occur particularly in simultaneous bilinguals (that is, speakers who learned both languages from birth). Speakers produced sentences in which there were target words with initial /p/...

The present study investigated whether lexical access is affected by a regular phonological variation in connected speech: voice assimilation in French. Two associative priming experiments were conducted to determine whether strongly assimilated, potentially ambiguous word forms activate the conceptual representation of the underlying word. Would t...

Quantity contrasts (i.e., singleton vs geminate consonants, short vs long vowels) are common in the languages of the world. Yet, most singleton-geminate contrasts occur in word-medial position. Languages that allow gemination in other than word-medial position (word-initially or word-finally) are quite few. Even less frequent is the occurrence in t...

The first part of this study examined (Parisian) French-learning 11-month-old infants' recognition of the six definite and indefinite French articles: le, la, les, un, une, and des. The six articles were compared with pseudoarticles in the context of disyllabic or monosyllabic nouns, using the Head-turn Preference Procedure. The pseudo articles wer...

In a series of 4 experiments, the authors show that phonological repair mechanisms, known to operate in the auditory modality, are directly translated in the visual modality. This holds with the provision that printed stimuli are presented for a very brief duration and that the effect of phonological repair is tested after a delay of some 100 ms ha...

Models of speech perception attribute a different role to contextual information in the processing of assimilated speech. This study concerned perceptual processing of regressive voice assimilation in French. This phonological variation is asymmetric in that assimilation is partial for voiced stops and nearly complete for voiceless stops. Two audit...

French listeners perceive illegal /tl/ and /dl/ clusters as legal /kl/ and /gl/, suggesting that /dl, tl/ undergo “phonotactic perceptual assimilation” to the phonetically most similar permissible clusters [Hallé et al., J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. (1998)]. However, without a comparison to native speakers of a language allowing initial...

Mandarin syllable structure does not allow consonant clusters. In this study, we investigated the perception of English initial consonant clusters by native speakers of Taiwanese Mandarin (TM). The results show that the factors that affect the perception of non-native clusters are the phonemic inventory of the native language, coarticulation within...

We used a corpus of radio and television speech to run a quantitative study of voicing assimilation in French. The results suggest that, although voicing itself can be incomplete, voice assimilation is es-sentially categorical. The amount of voicing as-similation little depends on underlying voicing but clearly varies with segment duration and also...

There is evidence of voice onset drift when bilinguals are submerged in cultures that are dominated by their second language (L2). Sancier and Fowler [Gestural drift in a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portuguese and English,‘‘ J. Phonet. 4, 421‐436 (1997)] found that voiceless stop voice onset times (VOTs) of a bilingual speaker of Brazilian Portu...

Previous studies, mainly conducted on English running speech, have reported that (place) assimilation between words is usually incomplete, and have suggested that the perceptual processing of word forms altered by that assimilation depends on the extent to which phonemes at word boundary have undergone assimilation. The present research provides an...

Previous work has not yielded clear conclusions about the categorical nature of perception of tone contrasts by native listeners of tone languages. We reopen this issue in a cross-linguistic study comparing Taiwan Mandarin and French listeners. We tested these listeners on three tone continua derived from natural Mandarin utterances within carrier...

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Hallé & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical...

Semantic transparency is a crucial factor in the processing of morphologically complex words, but seems to have a different impact depending on experimental conditions and languages. In English, semantic transparency is necessary to produce morphological priming in cross-modal priming, but not as clearly so in masked priming. The available reports...

Several theoretical models predict that nonnative speech discrimination depends on phonetic fit as well as phonolo- gical correspondence to native phonemes. Languages dif- fer both phonologically and phonetically, e.g., high vowels differ among English, French, Danish, Norwegian. All use /i u/, all except English use /y/, but only Norwegian has /å/...

Few reports exist on perception of lexical tones by native listeners (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) versus non‐native listeners whose language lacks tone contrasts. In those few, the non‐native language was English, in which pitch differences signal stress alternations. No studies have examined perception of minimal tone contrasts, of central concern to...

Interdisciplinary essays on central issues in cognitive science. In the early 1960s, the bold project of the emerging field of cognition was to put the human mind under the scrutiny of rational inquiry, through the conjoined efforts of philosophy, linguistics, computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. Forty years later, cognitive science is a...

Speech perception is strongly constrained by the phonological and prosodic properties of the native language. Previous studies have generally illustrated that point by showing that listeners presented with nonnative sounds "assimilate" them perceptually to native phonemes. In the experiments presented in this paper we observed a similar perceptual...

Speech perception is strongly constrained by the phonological and prosodic properties of the native language. Previous studies have generally illustrated that point by showing that listeners presented with nonnative sounds "assimilate" them perceptually to native phonemes. In the experiments presented in this paper we observed a similar perceptual...

Few reports exist on perception of three-way stop voicing distinctions by non-native listeners whose languages have two-way distinctions that vary phonologically and phonetically. We examined perception of Taiwanese stops by French, Mandarin, and American English listeners. Taiwanese has three voicing categories: unaspirated voiceless (U), aspirate...

In French words such as “absurde” (“bs/bt” words), the underlying linguistic code /b/ corresponds both to the spelling “b” and to the morphophonemic code {ab-} + {surd}. Yet, because of voice assimilation, the phonetic-acoustic and perceptual realization of the labial stop is [p] not [b]. In a phoneme monitoring task, listeners detected /b/ more of...

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of an abstract code (orthographic and/or morphophonemic) on the perception of the sounds in French spoken words. For this purpose, we used words whose surface phonology was not congruent either with both orthographic and morphophonemic codes or with orthographic code alone. Experiment 1 showed that...

The perception of American English (AE) approximant contrasts, /r/-/l/ in particular but also /w/-/r/ and /w/-/j/, has been extensively compared between AE speakers and speakers of Japanese or other languages lacking an /r/-/l/ contrast. The difficulty such listeners encounter with the AE /r/-/l/ contrast, especially those who have had little expos...

Evidence is presented for a perceptual shift affecting consonant clusters that are phonotactically illegal, albeit pronounceable, in French. They are perceived as phonetically close legal clusters. Specifically, word-initial /dl/ and /tl/ are heard as /gl/ and /kl/, respectively. In 2 phonemic gating experiments, participants generally judged short...

P. A. Halle, French infants vocal productions: Convergence toward the adult language patterns The study of French children's vocal productions suggests that, at each period of development, the emerging and developing aspects specific to French language are those aspects which are functional, given the children's cognitive capacities. Children soon...

Eleven-month-olds can recognize a few auditorily presented familiar words in experimental situations where no hints are given by the intonation, the situation, or the presence of possible visual referents. That is, infants of this age (and possibly somewhat younger) can recognize words based on sound patterns alone. The issue addressed in this arti...

The memory trace of the pitch sensation induced by a standard tone (S) can be strongly degraded by subsequently intervening sounds (I). Deutsch [Science 168, 1604-1605 (1970)] suggested that the degradation is much weaker when the I sounds are words than when they are tones. In Deutsch's study, however, the pitch relations between S and the I words...

Building a lexicon is a necessary step in the process of language acquisition. The emergence and development of vocabulary have usually been observed in naturalistic settings through their external manifestations: the first attempts at producing words, and the various signs showing that an infant comprehends words. Naturalistic approaches, however,...

This experiment examines whether 11-month-old and 12-month-old infants are able to recognize familiar words in a situation yielding no extralinguistic cues. Two experiments were run to compare infants' interest for familiar words, chosen in the early productive vocabulary of young infants, against rare words infrequent in French usage. Both experim...

The role of the cricothyroid muscle (CT) in raising F0 is well understood, but the activity of F0-lowering strap muscles such as the sternohyoid (SH) has been less thoroughly investigated, especially in speech. This study focused on the activve participation of the SH in the production of tones 2 (mid-rising) and 4 (high-falling) in Modern Standard...

In this study, some prosodic aspects of the disyllabic vocalizations (both babbling and words) produced by four French and four Japanese children of about 18 months of age, are examined. F0 contour and vowel durations in disyllables are found to be clearly language-specific. For French infants, rising F0 contours and final syllable lengthening are...

This study examined the production of the four tones of Mandarin Standard Chinese (MSC) in stressed target syllables appearing sentence-medially in “yi ge X zi” (a character X). Four syllable types —yi, bi, mi, and hu— were used. We tested one male native speaker of MSC, collecting both acoustic and EMG data for three laryngeal muscles —CT, SH, and...

A cross-cultural investigation of the influence of target-language in babbling was carried out. 1047 vowels produced by twenty 10-month-old infants from Parisian French, London English, Hong Kong Cantonese and Algiers Arabic language backgrounds were recorded in the cities of origin and spectrally analysed. F1-F2 plots of these vowels were obtained...

L'activite de deux muscles du larynx, le cricothyroidien et le sternohyoidien, dans la production des tons du chinois standard a ete etudiee au moyen de l'electromyographie . Des contours moyens d'activite musculaire et de frequence fondamentale ont ete obtenus pour chaque ton a partir de mesures prises sur differentes syllabes enchâssees dans une...

In the past ten years, the emergence of speech in infants has been investigated in the framework of theories regarding the capacities underlying speech as part of the biological equipment of man. In particular, studies of the perceptual capacities of neonates have shown the prerequisites for speech perception to be present in infants as early as th...

Based on over 400 character readings in the Nancheng city dialect of Eastern Jiangxi, a synchronic phonology is outlined and some sound correspondences with the Qie Yun system are worked out. Nancheng city dialect has the general characteristics of a Gan dialect and some Min-like developments in its rhyme system. Its principal feature of interest i...

Based on over 400 character readings in the Nancheng city dialect of Eastern Jiangxi, a synchronic phonology is outlined and some sound correspondences with the Qie Yun system are worked out. Nancheng city dialect has the general characteristics of a Gan dialect and some Min-like developments in its rhyme system. Its principal feature of interest i...

The presented work aims at exploring voicing alter-nation and assimilation on very large corpora us-ing a Bayesian framework. A voice feature (VF) variable has been introduced whose value is deter-mined using statistical acoustic phoneme models, corresponding to 3-state Gaussian mixture Hidden Markov Models. For all relevant consonants, i.e. oral p...