Journal articles on the topic 'French language Consonants'
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McLeod, Sharynne, and Kathryn Crowe. "Children's Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review." American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 27, no. 4 (November 21, 2018): 1546–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2018_ajslp-17-0100.
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Purpose The aim of this study was to provide a cross-linguistic review of acquisition of consonant phonemes to inform speech-language pathologists' expectations of children's developmental capacity by (a) identifying characteristics of studies of consonant acquisition, (b) describing general principles of consonant acquisition, and (c) providing case studies for English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. Method A cross-linguistic review was undertaken of 60 articles describing 64 studies of consonant acquisition by 26,007 children from 31 countries in 27 languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin (Putonghua), Portuguese, Setswana (Tswana), Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, and Xhosa. Results Most studies were cross-sectional and examined single word production. Combining data from 27 languages, most of the world's consonants were acquired by 5;0 years;months old. By 5;0, children produced at least 93% of consonants correctly. Plosives, nasals, and nonpulmonic consonants (e.g., clicks) were acquired earlier than trills, flaps, fricatives, and affricates. Most labial, pharyngeal, and posterior lingual consonants were acquired earlier than consonants with anterior tongue placement. However, there was an interaction between place and manner where plosives and nasals produced with anterior tongue placement were acquired earlier than anterior trills, fricatives, and affricates. Conclusions Children across the world acquire consonants at a young age. Five-year-old children have acquired most consonants within their ambient language; however, individual variability should be considered. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6972857
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Cabrera, Laurianne, Ranka Bijeljac-Babic, and Josiane Bertoncini. "The development of consonant and lexical-tone discrimination between 3 and 6 years: Effect of language exposure." International Journal of Bilingualism 23, no. 6 (June 25, 2018): 1249–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367006918781077.
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Aims and objectives:The present study explored children’s discrimination capacities for lexical tones and consonants between 3 and 6 years of age and the effect of native language on this ability. Recent studies in infants have shown a perceptual rebound for non-native listeners during the second year of life, but only for lexical tones. However, the later stages of development, and particularly when children start pre-school, are yet not clear.Design:Discrimination abilities of 134 children were measured in three age groups between 3 and 6 years using a behavioural task where children detected a change in lexical tones or consonants. Children were either French monolinguals, French bilinguals exposed to an Asian tone language or French bilinguals exposed to a second non-tone language at home.Data and analysis:Overall, results indicated that higher detection scores for consonants were observed from 4 to 5 years, while for lexical tones the highest scores were observed only at 5–6 years. Moreover, bilingual children exposed to an Asian tone language had higher scores for tones compared to monolingual French children. Interestingly, both bilingual groups, whether exposed to an Asian tone language or to a non-tone language, had better scores for tones than for French consonants, while monolinguals performed equally with both.Conclusions:Language exposure from an early age influences phonological development and bilingualism seems to enhance the perception of prosodic information.Originality:This study is the first to show a different developmental trajectory for consonant and lexical-tone discrimination between 3 and 6 years according to the native language.Significance:Similar detection scores for tones and consonants for monolingual French children and better detection for tones than for consonants for both groups of bilinguals suggest that the perception of lexical tone is determined by both language-specific influences and non-linguistic/auditory processing during childhood.
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FLOCCIA, CAROLINE, THIERRY NAZZI, CLAIRE DELLE LUCHE, SILVANA POLTROCK, and JEREMY GOSLIN. "English-learning one- to two-year-olds do not show a consonant bias in word learning." Journal of Child Language 41, no. 5 (July 19, 2013): 1085–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000913000287.
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ABSTRACTFollowing the proposal that consonants are more involved than vowels in coding the lexicon (Nespor, Peña & Mehler, 2003), an early lexical consonant bias was found from age 1;2 in French but an equal sensitivity to consonants and vowels from 1;0 to 2;0 in English. As different tasks were used in French and English, we sought to clarify this ambiguity by using an interactive word-learning study similar to that used in French, with British-English-learning toddlers aged 1;4 and 1;11. Children were taught two CVC labels differing on either a consonant or vowel and tested on their pairing of a third object named with one of the previously taught labels, or part of them. In concert with previous research on British-English toddlers, our results provided no evidence of a general consonant bias. The language-specific mechanisms explaining the differential status for consonants and vowels in lexical development are discussed.
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Schmidt, Deborah. "Phantom consonants in Basaa." Phonology 11, no. 1 (May 1994): 149–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675700001871.
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Basaa, a zone A Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, is only one among many genetically unrelated languages for which the positing of phonetically null phantom consonants facilitates a phonological account of certain otherwise unexpected surface forms encountered in derivational paradigms. Clements & Keyser (1983), Marlett & Stemberger (1983), Keyser & Kiparsky (1984), Crowhurst (1988) and Hualde (1992) propose that phantom consonants exist in Turkish, Seri, French, Finnish, Southern Paiute and Aranese Gascon, for example, syllabifying as onsets or codas where appropriate and in certain cases inducing the gemination of an adjacent consonantal segment or the lengthening of a preceding tautosyllabic vowel, as we shall see takes place in Basaa.
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Blazhevich, Yuliya. "Phonetic Peculiarities of the French Language of Cameroon." Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Serija 2. Jazykoznanije, no. 4 (December 2019): 221–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2019.4.17.
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Phonetic peculiarities of the territorial variant of the French language in Cameroon have been considered in the article. Audio- and video recordings of French-speaking Cameroonians have been used for the study. Significant divergences between the phonetic systems of the French language of the former metropolis and its Cameroonian version have been detected in the systems of vowels and consonants as well as on the prosodic level. The analysis proves that local Cameroonian languages being L1 of the speakers interfere with the French language of Cameroon as articulation habits of mother tongues are transferred into their speech in the French language. In the vowel system we have detected the following phonological phenomena: substitution of French sounds by the L1 ones, denasalization, diphthongization of vowels, change of sound length and use of epenthesis. In the consonant system such phenomena as substitution, devoicing, voicing, palatalization, sound opposition attenuation and consonant cluster simplification have been detected. Alterations are also observed on the prosodic level where L1 interference manifests in the form of excess tone marking transferred into French which is characteristic of most indigenous African languages. Four groups of accents spoken in Cameroon are also singled out and their main characteristics are described in the article.
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Tranel, Bernard. "French final consonants and nonlinear phonology." Lingua 95, no. 1-3 (March 1995): 131–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(95)90104-3.
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Genidze, N. K. "Vocalic Ratio as One of the Most Important Criteria of Phonetic Classification of World Languages." Discourse 6, no. 5 (November 30, 2020): 87–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2020-6-5-87-96.
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Introduction. The article analyses the vowel-consonant ratio as one of the most important criteria of phonetic typology in the world languages. Scientific relevance of the research is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis and comparison of grammar and phonetics in typologically, genetically and historically different languages.Methodology and sources. Certain language is determined by vocalic ratio – a concept introduced to identify the vowels-consonant relation and measured through vk = V/C. Thus, all the languages can be either vocalic (vk > 1.3), consonantal (vk < 0.7) or mixed (0.7 > vk > 1.3). The article concerns the ideas by Ferdinand de Saussure (Indo-European root’s structure) and Aleksander V. Isachenko (phonetic typology).Results and discussion. The author conducts a comparative analysis of phonological systems and phonetic analysis of text fragments in several languages of different families and different historical periods: Gothic, old English, old Icelandic, English, Danish, French, and Finnish. The research reveals how the language’s structure matches its vowel-consonant ratio, i. e. disclose a link between its phonetic and morphology-syntactic classifications.Conclusion. The research has proved the fact that analytic trends in phonemes, on the one hand, depend on the vowel-consonant distribution in the language and speech, and on historically determined difference between the phonemes’ function – on the other. Inevitably, too, the language’s evolution from inflectional-synthetic to analytic or agglutinative (analytic-agglutinative) type affects all language levels, including the phonetic one. Consonants are stronger and almost resistible to changes; they function to distinguish the sense, making relative words so similar. The development of vowel system triggers the development of analytic functions, which are bound to impact the language system. Increasing number of vowels, emerging diphthongs and triphthongs are the result of analytic abilities of the language.
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Nikiema, Emmanuel. "De la nécessité des positions vides dans les représentations syllabiques du gen." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 40, no. 3 (September 1995): 319–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100016005.
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AbstractThe introduction of empty nuclear positions in syllable structure goes back to the early 80s. Since then, empty nuclei have been proposed in phonological analyses to account for vocalic epenthesis (vowel/Ø alternation). The analysis of Gen put forth in this article argues for empty nuclei although no vowel/Ø alternation can be observed in the language. Nevertheless, on the basis of the tonal patterns of Gen, it is shown that empty positions must be part of the underlying representation of syllables in the language. Another aspect of the study deals with consonant clusters. Thus far, all analyses supporting empty positions within a cluster have also referred to the absence of cooccurrence restrictions among the consonants surrounding the empty vowel. This paper provides new insights since, in Gen, the consonant clusters in which empty nuclei are proposed are typical of those observed in branching onset languages (like French, Italian and English) or in languages having light diphthongs. We argue that all attested consonant clusters in Gen are heterosyllabic.
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Cichocki, W., A. B. House, A. M. Kinloch, and A. C. Lister. "Cantonese Speakers and the Acquisition of French Consonants." Language Learning 49 (1999): 95–121. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/0023-8333.49.s1.3.
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Cichocki, W., A. B. House, A. M. Kinloch, and A. C. Lister. "Cantonese Speakers and the Acquisition of French Consonants." Language Learning 43, no. 1 (March 1993): 43–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1993.tb00172.x.
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Stemberger, Joseph Paul. "CV phonology and French consonants: a concrete approach." Journal of Linguistics 21, no. 2 (September 1985): 453–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226700010355.
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Rose, Yvan. "Place Specification and Segmental Distribution in the Acquisition of Word-Final Consonant Syllabification." Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 48, no. 3-4 (December 2003): 409–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008413100000724.
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AbstractThis article focusses on data from two first language learners of Québec French, Clara and Théo. In both corpora, all word-final consonants are acquired before word-medial codas, except Clara’s [ʁ], which is acquired at the same time as medial codas. The behaviour of Clara’s [ʁ] is explained through the hypothesis that it is analysed by the child as placeless and that, in the unmarked case, place-specified consonants are syllabified word-finally as onsets, while placeless consonants are syllabified as codas. Supporting cross-linguistic evidence is provided from adult languages and from the acquisition of Japanese. Finally, data on the acquisition of Spanish are discussed. Based on distributional evidence, it is suggested that these learners of Spanish posit a coda syllabification for the word-final, place-specified coronal consonants of their language. These data support the view that default options are overridden when positive evidence steers the learner toward more marked options.
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SHOEMAKER, ELLENOR. "Durational cues to word recognition in spoken French." Applied Psycholinguistics 35, no. 2 (November 22, 2012): 243–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716412000380.
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ABSTRACTIn spoken French, the phonological processes of liaison and resyllabification can render word and syllable boundaries ambiguous (e.g.,un air“an air”/un nerf“a nerve,” both [.nɛʁ]). Production data have demonstrated that speakers of French vary the duration of consonants that surface in liaison environments relative to consonants produced word initially. Further research has suggested that listeners exploit these durational differences in the processing of running speech, although no study to date has directly tested this hypothesis. The current study examines the exploitation of duration in word recognition processes by manipulating this single acoustic factor while holding all other factors in the signal constant. The pivotal consonants in potentially ambiguous French sequences (e.g., /n/ inun nerf) were instrumentally shortened and lengthened and presented to listeners in two behavioral tasks. The results suggest that listeners are sensitive to segmental duration and use this information to modulate the lexical interpretation of spoken French.
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Bardić, Nataša Radusin. "SYNCOPA AND ASSIMILATION OF CONSONANTS IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH SPOKEN LANGUAGE." ZBORNIK ZA JEZIKE I KNJIŽEVNOSTI FILOZOFSKOG FAKULTETA U NOVOM SADU 1, no. 1 (December 2, 2011): 159. http://dx.doi.org/10.19090/zjik.2011.1.159-168.
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U savremenom francuskom jeziku ekonomičnost jezičkog izraza često se postižeizostavljanjem jednog ili više glasova, slogova ili reči unutar ritmičke grupe. Najčešće je rečo gubljenju „nepostojanog e”, koje potom dovodi do kombinatornih fonetskih promena glasova unovonastalom okruženju. Redukcija glasovnih nizova predstavlja jednu od osnovnih karakteristikasavremenog francuskog razgovornog jezika, što je potvrđeno nizom lingvističkih analiza. Mnogeprimere ovih supstandardnih jezičkih pojava moguće je uočiti analizirajući savremene francuskefilmove u kojima se često, upotrebom razgovornog jezika, nastoji dočarati neformalna govornasituacija. Za potrebe ovog rada odabrane su tri filmske scene koje verno ilustruju navedene karakteristikefrancuskog razgovornog jezika i koje mogu naći svoju pedagošku primenu u vidu autentičnihdokumenata u nastavi francuskog kao stranog jezika, u cilju razvijanja sposobnosti usmenograzumevanja francuskog razgovornog jezika.
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FÉRY, CAROLINE. "Markedness, Faithfulness, Vowel Quality and Syllable Structure in French." Journal of French Language Studies 13, no. 2 (September 2003): 247–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269503001121.
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The quality of vowels in French depends to a large extent on the kind of syllables they are in. Tense vowels are often in open syllables and lax vowels in closed ones. This generalisation, which has been called loi de position in the literature, is often overridden by special vowel-consonant co-occurrence restrictions obscuring this law. The article shows first that the admission of semisyllables in the phonology of French explains a large number of counterexamples. Many final closing consonants on the phonetic representation can be understood as onsets of following rime-less syllables, opening in this way the last full syllable. Arguments coming from phonotactic regularities support this analysis. The second insight of the article is that Optimality Theory is a perfect framework to account for the intricate data bearing on the relationship between vowels and syllable structure. The loi de position is an effect dubbed Emergence of the Unmarked, instantiated only in case no higher-ranking constraint renders it inactive.
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Paradis, Carole, and Fatimazohra El Fenne. "French verbal inflection revisited: Constraints, repairs and floating consonants." Lingua 95, no. 1-3 (March 1995): 169–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(95)90105-1.
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Archibald, John. "Segmental and Prosodic Evidence for Property-by-Property Transfer in L3 English in Northern Africa." Languages 7, no. 1 (February 6, 2022): 28. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages7010028.
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In this paper, I argue in favour of property-by-property transfer in the third language acquisition of English by L1 Arabic and L2 French speakers in Northern Africa (Algeria and Tunisia) based on a reanalysis of previous work. I provide a phonological analysis of their spontaneous production data in the domains of consonants, vowels, stress, and rhythm. The L3 phonology shows evidence of influence from both L1 Arabic and L2 French, with mixed influences found both within and across segmental and prosodic domains. The vowels are French-influenced, while the consonants are Arabic-influenced; the stress is a mixture of Arabic and French influence while the rhythm is French. I argue that these data are explained if we adopt a Contrastive Hierarchy Model of feature structure with the addition of parsing theories such as those proposed by Lightfoot. These data provide further evidence in support of the Westergaard’s Linguistic Proximity Model. I conclude by showing how this approach can allow us to formalize a measure of linguistic I-proximity and thus explain when the L1 or L2 structures will transfer.
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Storme, Benjamin. "Contrast enhancement as motivation for closed syllable laxing and open syllable tensing." Phonology 36, no. 2 (May 2019): 303–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0952675719000149.
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This paper proposes that closed syllable laxing and open syllable tensing of non-low vowels are motivated by conflicting strategies of contrast enhancement in vowel–consonant sequences. Laxing enhances the distinctiveness of consonant contrasts by allowing for more distinct VC formant transitions, in particular in sequences involving a non-low vowel followed by an oral labial/coronal/velar consonant (e.g. [p t k]). Tensing enhances the distinctiveness of vowel contrasts by providing more distinct formant realisations for vowels. Linguistic variation results from different ways of resolving the tension between maximising vowel dispersion and maximising consonant dispersion. Laxing typically applies before coda consonants as a way to compensate for the absence of good perceptual cues to place of articulation. The hypothesis that laxing enhances the distinctiveness of postvocalic place contrasts is supported by a study of mid-vowel laxing in French, which corroborates the general claim that perceptual contrast plays a role in shaping phonotactic restrictions.
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Schlüter, Julia. "Tracing the (re-)emergence of /h/ and /j/ onsets through 350 years of books: Mergers and merger reversals at the interface of phonetics and phonology." Folia Linguistica 40, no. 1 (July 26, 2019): 177–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/flih-2019-0009.
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Abstract This paper investigates the (re-)emergence of onset consonants in English loans from French, Latin and Greek, spelt with initial <u> (> /juː/; e.g. union, use), initial <eu> (> /juː/; e.g. eulogy, euphemism), or initial <h> (e.g. habit, homogeneous). It analyses Google Books data, exploiting the occurrence of the article allomorph a (rather than an) as a diagnostic of consonantal realisation. The analysis yields a fine-grained description of the (re-)emergence of consonantal onsets. It shows that their emergence has been a gradual process and has not reached completion yet. On a theoretical level, the paper discusses the interaction between categorical phonological processing and fine-grained phonetic distinctions in an exemplar-based framework. It also sheds light on the question of (near-)mergers and their potential reversibility.
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Dehaene-Lambertz, G., E. Dupoux, and A. Gout. "Electrophysiological Correlates of Phonological Processing: A Cross-linguistic Study." Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12, no. 4 (July 2000): 635–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/089892900562390.
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It is well known that speech perception is deeply affected by the phoneme categories of the native language. Recent studies have found that phonotactics, i.e., constraints on the cooccurrence of phonemes within words, also have a considerable impact on speech perception routines. For example, Japanese does not allow (nonasal) coda consonants. When presented with stimuli that violate this constraint, as in / ebzo/, Japanese adults report that they hear a /u/ between consonants, i.e., /ebuzo/. We examine this phenomenon using event-related potentials (ERPs) on French and Japanese participants in order to study how and when the phonotactic properties of the native language affect speech perception routines. Trials using four similar precursor stimuli were presented followed by a test stimulus that was either identical or different depending on the presence or absence of an epenthetic vowel /u/ between two consonants (e.g., “ebuzo ebuzo ebuzo—ebzo”). Behavioral results confirm that Japanese, unlike French participants, are not able to discriminate between identical and deviant trials. In ERPs, three mismatch responses were recorded in French participants. These responses were either absent or significantly weaker for Japanese. In particular, a component similar in latency and topography to the mismatch negativity (MMN) was recorded for French, but not for Japanese participants. Our results suggest that the impact of phonotactics takes place early in speech processing and support models of speech perception, which postulate that the input signal is directly parsed into the native language phonological format. We speculate that such a fast computation of a phonological representation should facilitate lexical access, especially in degraded conditions.
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Dascălu, Ioana-Rucsandra. "Les consonnes aspirées dans les textes latins tardifs." Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59, no. 1-4 (September 25, 2020): 45–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/068.2019.59.1-4.7.
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SummaryOur contribution to the Colloquium of Late and Vulgar Latin has been anticipated by previous interventions and articles written on that subject. We have been much helped by the online data of the projects PaLaFra and CoLaMer, which are offering a wide range of texts in late Latin, both historical and hagiographic.We found it hard to define aspirated consonants: they do not exist in modern languages (for instance in French), where they are called digrams or graphical groups or graphemes.In a corpus made up of late Latin texts, we have discovered words of various origins which contain aspirated consonants: the Hebrew ones are very numerous: pascha or proper names: Seth, Lamech, Iafet/Iaphet (Fredegar), Sabaoth (Passio Quirini). There are also Greek words borrowed by Latin: machi- natio, monachus, thesaurus, prophetess. The Merovingian texts (6th-8th centuries) are a real source of words containing aspirated consonants: the unadapted Frankish words of Pactus legis salicae, which occur together with latinized ones: Bothem, Rhenus, chranne. In Liber Historiae Francorum there are many names of persons and of populations which contain aspirated consonants: Chlodio, Merovechus, Childericus, Gothi. There are many hesitations in the transcription of the aspirated consonants in late Latin texts, therefore we consider our intervention a very useful one for latinists, for specialists of Old French and for romanists.
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GONZALEZ-GOMEZ, NAYELI, and THIERRY NAZZI. "Delayed acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities." Journal of Child Language 43, no. 1 (March 19, 2015): 186–206. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000915000112.
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ABSTRACTThe ability to compute non-adjacent regularities is key in the acquisition of a new language. In the domain of phonology/phonotactics, sensitivity to non-adjacent regularities between consonants has been found to appear between 7 and 10 months. The present study focuses on the emergence of a posterior–anterior (PA) bias, a regularity involving two non-adjacent vowels. Experiments 1 and 2 show that a preference for PA over AP (anterior–posterior) words emerges between 10 and 13 months in French-learning infants. Control experiments show that this bias cannot be explained by adjacent or positional preferences. The present study demonstrates that infants become sensitive to non-adjacent vocalic distributional regularities between 10 and 13 months, showing the existence of a delay for the acquisition of non-adjacent vocalic regularities compared to equivalent non-adjacent consonantal regularities. These results are consistent with theCV hypothesis, according to which consonants and vowels play different roles at different linguistic levels.
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Boizou, Loïc, and Asta Kazlauskienė. "Lithuanian and French Sounds: Comparative Analysis of Articulatory Features." Sustainable Multilingualism 17, no. 1 (November 18, 2020): 173–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/sm-2020-0018.
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SummaryThe aim of this article is to analyze the differences between Lithuanian and French sounds and to provide a general outlook of the Lithuanian articulatory phonetics mainly intended for French speakers. Such a comparative analysis is relevant because (a) there is no consistent equivalent between written and spoken language, even in Lithuanian, which has a relatively young written language, (b) the international phonetic alphabet does not always accurately reflect differences in pronunciation, (c) the contrastive perspective helps learners to focus on differences that could be unnoticed. Besides the articulatory aspects, the orthographic issues where the spoken form cannot be directly deduced from the written form by a simple relation from grapheme to sound but depends on the graphemic context (mainly related to some assimilation processes) are given a special attention. The questions that remain controversial between Lithuanian phoneticians (such as the retroflex status of the phonetic counterparts of <š> and <ž>) are also mentioned. The comparative analysis shows that the two systems exhibit significant differences: most sounds are not shared. Nevertheless, differences are often slight, so that it is more an issue of orthoepics. Attention should be paid to the differences in the duration and qualitative characteristics of long and short vowels and the relation of graphemes <a, e, o, i> to sounds. From the point of view of consonants, [], [r, rj], [x, ] are problematic, their pronunciation must be learned separately. The pronunciation of palatalized consonants as simple consonants, and not as clusters with [j] as the second element, is also challenging for French speakers.
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Lagutina, Anna, and Tat'yana Lalova. "Phonological peculiarities (segmental level) of the French language in Pondicherry (India)." Филология: научные исследования, no. 5 (May 2021): 19–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.7256/2454-0749.2021.5.35603.
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This article is dedicated to examination of phonological peculiarities of segmental level of the French language in Pondicherry, one of the regions of the Republic of India. This region is a former trading post of the Fifth Republic, and currently is part of the preserved so-called “French India”. The goal of this research consists in determination of phonetic peculiarities of the French language of the population of Pondicherry in comparison with the central norm of pronunciation in France. The authors conducted an auditory analysis of the text recorded by the broadcasters, as well as thoroughly analyzed its results. In the course of research, the authors examined the level of realization of phonological oppositions within the system of vowels; as well as peculiarities of pronunciation of consonants, preservation or non-preservation of the phenomenon of “binding”, along with the instances pronunciation or fall out of [ə] caduc. The main conclusion consists in confirmation of the assumption on the causes of certain difficulties in realization of the French norm of pronunciation among the residents of Pondicherry. The differences in phonological systems of the French and Tamil languages (native to the population of Pondicherry) are the cause of the emergence distortions or replacements of certain French phonetic sounds. The conducted determined the pronunciation characteristics of French language of the population of Pondicherry, which were affected by their native Tamil language.
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Teixeira, Elizabeth Reis. "Padrões iniciais na aquisição do sistema de sons do português: características universais e específicas." Cadernos de Estudos Lingüísticos 40 (August 10, 2011): 53–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.20396/cel.v40i0.8637119.
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Adopting a strictly motor approach to linguistic organization, the theoretical proposal called Molde e Conteúdo (Davies & Macneilage 1995; Macneilage & Davies 1966) argues that the first child production akin to adult speech – canonical babbling – can be seen as a motor correlate of the molde silábico. Moldes constitute a rhythmic basis catalyzing specific syllabic or segmental sequences. The independent motor control of such elements emerges gradually from jaw/tongue synergies with which the child initiates a type of vocal production similar to the adult’s. In the acquisition of speech production skills, then, changes in the quality of sounds in an utterance are initially based in changes in the amplitude of the jaw opening/closing cycle, i.e., they determine intra-syllabic organization. Syllables sequences, in turn, comprise vocalic and consonantal qualities produced in homorganic articulation places (i.e. front consonants with front vowels; back consonants with back vowels), as demonstrated child data derived from six different linguistic communities – English, Swedish, French, Japanese (in the Stanford database), Brazilian Portuguese (Teixeira & Davies 1999) e Equatorial Quichua (Gildersleeve-Neumann, doctoral dissertation in preparation, U. Texas, Austin). In general, the data on Brazilian Portuguese acquisition are comparable to production universal patterns reported for children in different languages, but also show specific characteristics due to the ambient language pressure.
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Samarin, William. "Convergence and the Retention of Marked Consonants in Sango: the Creation and Appropriation of a Pidgin." Journal of Language Contact 2, no. 1 (2008): 225–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/000000008792525354.
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AbstractSango challenges allegations that the sound inventories of pidgins are small and that in language contact sound change often leads to loss or assimilation in phonemic distinctions. Sango has retained almost the whole phonological system of Ngbandi, on which it is based. This is explained, not by substratal influence—the systems of co-territorial Ubangian languages of the Banda and Gbaya groups—but by similar systems of several West African and especially central Bantu languages spoken by the workers and soldiers who were brought to the Ubangi River basin by Belgian colonizers, beginning in 1887 and very soon after by the French, and who, with the indigenes, very quickly created a new language that was soon appropriated by the Ngbandis, thereby preserving at least this part of their own language.
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Bedoin, Nathalie, and Christophe dos Santos. "How do consonant feature values affect the processing of a CVCV structure?" Written Language and Literacy 11, no. 2 (March 24, 2009): 191–210. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/wll.11.2.05bed.
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This paper discusses one experiment on the French language which shows that distinctive phonological feature similarity between consonants influences the processing of a C1VC2V pseudo-word during a high demanding reading task. When participants were asked to recall one of the two consonants, they made more errors in recalling the voicing of C2 (but not C1) when C1 and C2 disagreed in voicing than when they agreed, a pattern which is reminiscent of progressive harmony. A similar trend was found for manner similarity. This study confirms that sub-phonemic information about voicing is extracted rapidly in reading and can cause early phonetic priming. The elaboration of lateral inhibitory relations between phoneme detectors during reading acquisition can serve to counter errors from this early phonetic priming.1
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MACLEOD, ANDREA A. N., and CAROL STOEL-GAMMON. "The use of voice onset time by early bilinguals to distinguish homorganic stops in Canadian English and Canadian French." Applied Psycholinguistics 30, no. 1 (January 2009): 53–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716408090036.
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ABSTRACTThe goal of this study was to examine the extent to which bilingual speakers maintain language-specific phonological contrasts for homorganic stops when a cue is shared across both languages. To this end, voice onset time (VOT) was investigated in three groups of participants: early bilinguals speakers of Canadian French and Canadian English (n = 8), monolingual speakers of Canadian English (n = 8), and monolingual speakers of Canadian French (n = 7). Three questions were targeted: What are the general patterns of VOT production in bilingual and monolinguals? Do bilingual speakers produce different mean VOT than monolinguals? Do bilingual speakers produce different variability in VOT than monolinguals? Acoustic measurements of VOT were made from monosyllabic English and French words with word-initial bilabial or coronal stop consonants. The results indicate that the early bilingual speakers maintain monolingual-like phonemic contrasts, but that they exhibit more variation within categories than monolingual speakers.
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MEINSCHAEFER, JUDITH, SVEN BONIFER, and CHRISTINE FRISCH. "Variable and invariable liaison in a corpus of spoken French." Journal of French Language Studies 25, no. 3 (April 28, 2015): 367–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269515000186.
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ABSTRACTUsing texts selected from the C-Oral-Rom corpus, this study considers how linguistic and sociolinguistic variables affect liaison. In the majority of cases, liaison appears on monosyllabic function words. Individual lexemes differ greatly in rate of liaison. With regard to sociolinguistic variation, female speakers realize liaison consonants more often than male speakers, younger speakers realize it more often than older speakers, and liaison rates for speakers without university degree are higher than for speakers with university degree. Results are discussed in the light of models of prosodic structure and with respect to their implications for models of socio-linguistic variation.
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Grosjean, Francois, and Joanne L. Miller. "Going in and out of Languages: An Example of Bilingual Flexibility." Psychological Science 5, no. 4 (July 1994): 201–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1994.tb00501.x.
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When bilinguals speak to one another, they choose a base language to interact in and then, depending on the need, code-switch to the other (guest) language for a word, a phrase, or a sentence During the perception of a code switch, there is a momentary dominance of base-language units at the onset of the switch, but it is unknown whether this base-language effect is also present in production, that is, whether the phonetics of the base language carry over into the guest language In this study, French-English bilinguals retold stories and read sentences monolingually in English and in French and bilingually in French with English code switches Both the stories and the sentences contained critical words that began with unvoiced stop consonants, whose voice onset times (VOT) were measured The results showed that the base language had no impact on the production of code switches The shift from one language to the other was total and immediate This manifestation of cross-linguistic flexibility is accounted for in terms of a bilingual production model
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Gess, Randall. "Rethinking the Dating of Old French Syllable-Final Consonant Loss." Diachronica 16, no. 2 (December 31, 1999): 261–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.16.2.03ges.
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SUMMARY Based on the assumption that the loss of the Old French word-internal syllable-final consonants (/S/ ( = [s] and [z]), /N/ ( = all nasal consonants), forward a unified analysis of these changes according to which they should have taken place within two or three centuries, rather than the ten or eleven centuries that has previously been assumed. I provide empirical support for this analysis. Previous hypotheses, which treat the changes as entirely separate events, are shown to be inadequate and lacking of tenable empirical support. RÉSUMÉ Basé sur la supposition que la perte en ancien français des consonnes finales des syllabes internes (/S/ ( = [s] et [z]), /N/ (=toute consonne nasale), /I/ et /R/) sont des manifestations individuelles d'un seul processus général, j'avance une analyse unifiée de ces changements selon laquelle ils ont dû avoir lieu dans une période de deux ou trois siècles, au lieu de dix ou onze siècles, comme on l'a supposé avant. Je pourvois des données empiriques à l'appui de cette analyse. Je montre que les hypothèses précédentes, selon lesquelles les changements sont des événements tout à fait séparés, sont insuffisantes et manquantes de soutien empirique défendable. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Aufgrund der Annahme, dass der Verlust der wort-internen Konsonanten in Silben-Endstellung (/S/ ( = [s] und [z]), /N/ ( = alle Nasalkonsonanten), /l/ und /R/) Anzeichen eines einzigen Prozesses ist, wird eine einheitliche Analyse dieser Veränderungen vorgelegt, denenzufolge sie in einem Zeitraum von zwei oder drei Jahrhunderten stattgefunden haben sollen, und nicht, wie bisher angenommen, von zehn oder elf. Für diese Analyse wird empirische Stütze geliefert. Es wird gezeigt, dass bisherige Hypothesen, diese Veränderungen als vollkommen getrennte Ereignisse zu behandeln, wegen ihres Mangels an haltbarer, empirischer Stütze unzureichend sind.
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Rose, Yvan. "Relations between segmental and prosodic structure in first language acquisition." Annual Review of Language Acquisition 2 (October 1, 2002): 117–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/arla.2.06ros.
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In this paper, I discuss a number of relations that take place between melodic content and higher prosodic structure in first language phonological development. I explore acquisition patterns found in data on the acquisition of Québec French. Starting with the observation that prosodic structure and, more specifically, stressed syllables, play a central role in phonological acquisition, I hypothesize that the inter-relations between prosodic and segmental structure posited by formal models of phonological organisation should be witnessed within and across developmental stages. I support this hypothesis through two findings from the French data. First, complex onsets emerge in stressed syllables before unstressed ones. Second, different types of consonants (placeless versus place-specified) emerge in word-final position at different stages. From these observations, I argue that the phenomena observed in these data are best captured in an analysis based on constituent structure and relationships between feature specification and prosodic constituency, which are governed by universal markedness.
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Spa, J. J. "Les Deux Schèmes Syllabiques du Français." Lingvisticæ Investigationes. International Journal of Linguistics and Language Resources 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1987): 197–223. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.11.1.09spa.
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In the present paper is proposed a theory of the French syllable within the framework of non-linear phonology. The theory claims to be a novel one in that it stresses the need for a distinction between two types of syllable templates, one for full vowels and one for shwa. Some evidence will be presented that in other languages, especially in Dutch, more than one canonical syllable template has to be admitted as well. This view clearly conflicts with Trommelen 1984 because of her idea to explain, by means of only one syllable template, the all but uniform phonotactic behaviour of the Dutch vowels. Noske 1982 and Rialland 1986 will also be contested, the one for his refusal to admit that a French syllabic onset may consist of three consonants, the other for her assumption that French has two kinds of shwas.
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Hennequin, Alexandre, Amélie Rochet-Capellan, Silvain Gerber, and Marion Dohen. "Does the Visual Channel Improve the Perception of Consonants Produced by Speakers of French With Down Syndrome?" Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 61, no. 4 (April 17, 2018): 957–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2017_jslhr-h-17-0112.
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Purpose This work evaluates whether seeing the speaker's face could improve the speech intelligibility of adults with Down syndrome (DS). This is not straightforward because DS induces a number of anatomical and motor anomalies affecting the orofacial zone. Method A speech-in-noise perception test was used to evaluate the intelligibility of 16 consonants (Cs) produced in a vowel–consonant–vowel context (Vo = /a/) by 4 speakers with DS and 4 control speakers. Forty-eight naïve participants were asked to identify the stimuli in 3 modalities: auditory (A), visual (V), and auditory–visual (AV). The probability of correct responses was analyzed, as well as AV gain, confusions, and transmitted information as a function of modality and phonetic features. Results The probability of correct response follows the trend AV > A > V, with smaller values for the DS than the control speakers in A and AV but not in V. This trend depended on the C: the V information particularly improved the transmission of place of articulation and to a lesser extent of manner, whereas voicing remained specifically altered in DS. Conclusions The results suggest that the V information is intact in the speech of people with DS and improves the perception of some phonetic features in Cs in a similar way as for control speakers. This result has implications for further studies, rehabilitation protocols, and specific training of caregivers. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6002267
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Kenstowicz, Michael, and Nabila Louriz. "Reverse Engineering: Emphatic Consonants and the Adaptation of Vowels in French Loanwords into Moroccan Arabic." Brill's Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 1, no. 1 (November 1, 2009): 41–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187666309x12491131130701.
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Smirkou, Ahmed. "Sonority Principle in French Nominal Loanwords into Moroccan Arabic: An Optimality-theoretic Analysis." International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation 3, no. 10 (October 30, 2020): 54–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2020.3.10.7.
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This paper examines the adaptation of French nominal loans into Moroccan Arabic by adopting the framework of optimality theory. The focus is to unveil the phonological and morphological repair strategies enforced by the phonotactic constraints of the borrowing language to resolve sonority principle in complex codas. The investigated phonological strategy is schwa and a high vowel epenthesis. Schwa epenthesis is triggered to split final biconsonantal codas that violate sonority principle. In three consonantal coda clusters, schwa insertion is conditioned by the sonority value of the consonants, where it is consistently epenthesized before the most sonorous segment. A high vowel behaves differently; it is epenthesized in the final position without splitting the coda cluster, and enforces the cluster to be syllabified as an onset instead of a coda, and as such sonority principle is satisfied. It is also argued that the addition of the morphological marker {-a}, which is primarily morphologically driven, indirectly satisfies sonority principle; by doing so, it blocks the application of schwa or a high vowel epenthesis, which points to the fact that such phonological and morphological strategies conspire to satisfy sonority principle. The study also provides further support for the phonological stance on loanword adaptation.
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Vallery, Robin, and Maarten Lemmens. "The sound of taboo." Sex, Death & Politics 28, no. 1 (December 31, 2021): 87–137. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.20021.val.
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Abstract Swear words of English and French, both real and fictional ones, significantly tend to contain the least sonorous consonants, compared to the rest of the lexicon. What can explain the overrepresentation of such sounds among swear words? This might be a case of sound symbolism, when sounds are unconsciously associated with a meaning. We examine the pragmatic vs. semantic nature of the meaning involved, as well as two explanations in terms of iconicity (plosives may be associated with “violation of hearer’s space”, or unsonorous consonants may be associated with “aggression”). This unusual sound-meaning pairing would involve an emotional-contextual, non-truth-conditional meaning, and be powerful enough that it influences a strong sociolinguistic convention – which words are swear words and which ones are not – suggesting that sounds convey meaning in yet unsuspected ways.
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Strah-Farber, Madeline G. "An acoustic analysis of French vowel phoneme substitutions in native English speakers." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 151, no. 4 (April 2022): A45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0010609.
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In the last 60 years of second language acquisition research, much has changed from the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) and the belief from Eric Lenneberg that producing second language vowels and consonants was too tricky without a first language accent (Harley, 1997). These casual remarks and observations would set in motion further extensions of CPH to help focus equal attention on second language learning. It would not be until 1987 and research conducted by Jim Flege that the world would begin to see how American college students can produce and differentiate between the close fronted /y/ and its back closed counterpart /u/ (Flege, 2005). Flege would conclude through his experiment that second language learners (L2) of French had an easier time producing a “new” vowel or vowel that is absent from their first language (L1) inventory because the habit of substitution would not be as frequent (Flege, 2005). The research that will be attempted will try to show how with more experience as a French student, students will be able to form a separate category for the high fronted close /y/, regardless of how close it is to its American English counterpart /u/, or the predictions set forth by the Learning Speech Model.
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Kehoe, Margaret M., Tamara Patrucco-Nanchen, Margaret Friend, and Pascal Zesiger. "The Relationship Between Lexical and Phonological Development in French-Speaking Children: A Longitudinal Study." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 63, no. 6 (June 22, 2020): 1807–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2020_jslhr-19-00011.
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Purpose This study examines the influence of lexical and phonological factors on expressive lexicon size in 40 French-speaking children tested longitudinally from 22 to 48 months. The factors include those based on the lexical and phonological properties of words in the children's lexicons (phonetic complexity, word length, neighborhood density [ND], and word frequency [WF]) as well as variables measuring phonological production (percent consonants correct and phonetic inventory size). Specifically, we investigate the relative influence of these factors at individual ages, namely, 22, 29, 36, and 48 months, and which factors measured at 22 and 29 months influence lexicon size at 36 and 48 months. Method Children were selected based on parent-reported vocabulary size. We included children with low, medium, and high vocabulary scores. The children's lexicons were coded in terms of phonetic complexity, word length, ND, and WF, and their phonological production skills were based on measures of percent consonants correct and phonetic inventory size extracted from spontaneous speech samples at 29, 36, and 48 months. In the case of ND and WF, we focused on one- and two-syllable nouns. Results Across the age range, the most important factor that explained variance in lexicon size was the WF of nouns. Children who selected low-frequency nouns had larger vocabularies across all ages (22–48 months). The WF of two-syllable nouns and phonological production measured at 29 months influenced lexicon size at 36 months, whereas the WF (of one- and two-syllable words) influenced lexicon size at 48 months. Conclusions The findings support the role of WF and phonological production in explaining expressive vocabulary development. Children enlarge their vocabularies by adding nouns of increasingly lower frequency. Phonological production plays a role in accounting for vocabulary size up until the age of 36 months. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12291074
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THOMAS, DOWNING A. "Rameau's Platée returns: A case of double identity in the Querelle des bouffons." Cambridge Opera Journal 18, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586706002084.
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Although the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s comic opera Platée predated the Querelle des bouffons by several years, it raised questions that were at the centre of the debate that shook the Paris Opéra in the early 1750s. Commentators had difficulty situating Platée within the French operatic tradition; and many identified it as a work derived from Italian models. The opera’s music and libretto, mentioned in many of the letters and pamphlets written during the Querelle, clearly struck a nerve. Platée challenged the aesthetic status of French opera by foregrounding aspects of the French language to which participants in the Querelle, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, objected: the silent ‘e’, the presence of diphthongs and an overabundance of consonants. In the end, by undermining the traditional poetic framework through which operatic works were understood in the mid-eighteenth century, the debate on Platée during the Querelle opened up new possibilities for discourse on music.
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Detey, Sylvain, and Isabelle Racine. "Towards a perceptually assessed corpus of non-native French." Segmental, prosodic and fluency features in phonetic learner corpora 3, no. 2 (December 4, 2017): 223–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.3.2.06det.
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Abstract In this article, we describe the main methodological steps taken in the InterPhonologie du Français Contemporain (IPFC) research project to build an international corpus of spoken French as a Foreign Language for research and educational purposes. We offer a brief illustration of our approach with a four-session longitudinal study of 12 beginner Japanese learners of French over two years, especially /b/ and /v/ consonants produced in two tasks (repetition and reading of an identical wordlist). Our results illustrate how our perception-based first-screening coding approach provides us with rich information about the developmental profile of the learners, taking into account the task (repetition vs reading), the position in the word (initial, medial, final), the perceptual phonetic characteristics, and ultimately the left and right phonological context of the structure under scrutiny. This work is the first step in an iterative approach to further test experimentally subsets of the non-target-like productions from an acoustic-perceptual point of view.
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Joanisse, Marc, and Félix Desmeules Trudel. "How do non-native phonemes impact learning words in a second language? Evidence from eyetracking and EEG in a laboratory word learning study." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 152, no. 4 (October 2022): A237. http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0016130.
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A classic finding holds that listeners have significant difficulty categorizing and discriminating unfamiliar/nonnative phonemes. In the present study we examined how this influences learning new words in a second language (L2). Adult monolingual English speakers were trained on a pseudo-French vocabulary, by matching images of cartoon “aliens” to auditory CVCV words incorporating French vowels and consonants. Of interest was comparing words incorporating vowels similar to English to those containing highly unfamiliar vowels (here, the French high front rounded vowel [y]). Accuracy, eyetracking and event-related potentials (ERPs, measured with EEG) were then used to assess word recognition post-training. The neurocognitive measures indicated weakened recognition of words containing the novel [y] vowel, compared to words with vowels that more closely resembled those in English. Furthermore, we found that a training regime that emphasized discriminating easily confused vowels (i.e., [u] vs. [y]) during learning yielded somewhat improved recognition, both immediately after training and in a follow-up session. Interestingly, learning words containing the unfamiliar [y] vowel was not accompanied by improved AX discrimination of this vowel. The results have key implications for how we understand the role of phonology in L2 word representations, and for how we approach L2 teaching.
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Mairano, Paolo, and Fabian Santiago. "What vocabulary size tells us about pronunciation skills: Issues in assessing L2 learners." Journal of French Language Studies 30, no. 2 (July 2020): 141–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269520000010.
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AbstractMeasures 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 even less so in terms of pronunciation. In this article, we compare vocabulary and pronunciation measures for 25 Italian instructed learners of L2 French. We measure their receptive (Dialang score) and productive (vocd-D, MTLD) vocabulary size, and calculate the following pronunciation indices: acoustic distance and overlap of realizations for selected L2 French vowel pairs, ratings of nasality for ratings of foreign-accentedness, fluency metrics. We find that vocabulary measures show low to medium correlations with fluency metrics and ratings of foreign-accentedness, but not with vowel metrics. We then turn our attention to the impact of research methods on the study of vocabulary and pronunciation. More specifically, we discuss the possibility that these results are due to pitfalls in vocabulary and pronunciation indices, such as the failure of Dialang to take into account the effect of L1-L2 cognates, and the lack of measures for evaluating consonants, intonation and perception skills.
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Kehoe, Margaret M., and Emilie Cretton. "Intraword Variability in French-Speaking Monolingual and Bilingual Children." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 64, no. 7 (July 16, 2021): 2453–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1044/2021_jslhr-20-00558.
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Purpose This study examines intraword variability in 40 typically developing French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6–4;8 (years;months). Specifically, it measures rate of intraword variability and investigates which factors best account for it. They include child-specific ones such as age, expressive vocabulary, gender, bilingual status, and speech sound production ability, and word-specific factors, such as phonological complexity (including number of syllables), phonological neighborhood density (PND), and word frequency. Method A variability test was developed, consisting of 25 words, which differed in terms of phonological complexity, PND, and word frequency. Children produced three exemplars of each word during a single session, and productions of words were coded as variable or not variable. In addition, children were administered an expressive vocabulary test and two tests tapping speech motor ability (oral motor assessment and diadochokinetic test). Speech sound ability was also assessed by measuring percent consonants correct on all words produced by the children during the session. Data were entered into a binomial logistic regression. Results Average intraword variability was 29% across all children. Several factors were found to predict intraword variability including age, gender, bilingual status, speech sound production ability, phonological complexity, and PND. Conclusions Intraword variability was found to be lower in French than what has been reported in English, consistent with phonological differences between French and English. Our findings support those of other investigators in indicating that the factors influencing intraword variability are multiple and reflect sources at various levels in the speech processing system.
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Abramov, Aleksei V., and Vladimir V. Ivanov. "Collection and evaluation of lexical complexity data for Russian language using crowdsourcing." Russian Journal of Linguistics 26, no. 2 (June 29, 2022): 409–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.22363/2687-0088-30118.
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Estimating word complexity with binary or continuous scores is a challenging task that has been studied for several domains and natural languages. Commonly this task is referred to as Complex Word Identification (CWI) or Lexical Complexity Prediction (LCP). Correct evaluation of word complexity can be an important step in many Lexical Simplification pipelines. Earlier works have usually presented methodologies of lexical complexity estimation with several restrictions: hand-crafted features correlated with word complexity, performed feature engineering to describe target words with features such as number of hypernyms, count of consonants, Named Entity tag, and evaluations with carefully selected target audiences. Modern works investigated the use of transforner-based models that afford extracting features from surrounding context as well. However, the majority of papers have been devoted to pipelines for the English language and few translated them to other languages such as German, French, and Spanish. In this paper we present a dataset of lexical complexity in context based on the Russian Synodal Bible collected using a crowdsourcing platform. We describe a methodology for collecting the data using a 5-point Likert scale for annotation, present descriptive statistics and compare results with analogous work for the English language. We evaluate a linear regression model as a baseline for predicting word complexity on handcrafted features, fastText and ELMo embeddings of target words. The result is a corpus consisting of 931 distinct words that used in 3,364 different contexts.
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Muldner, Kasia, Leah Hoiting, Leyna Sanger, Lev Blumenfeld, and Ida Toivonen. "The phonetics of code-switched vowels." International Journal of Bilingualism 23, no. 1 (June 7, 2017): 37–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367006917709093.
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Aims and Objectives: This study investigates the effects of code-switching on vowel quality, pitch and duration among English–French bilinguals. Code-switching has been claimed to influence the morphology, syntax and lexicon, but not the phonology of the switched language. However, studies on voice-onset time have found subtle phonetic effects of code-switching, even though there are no categorical phonological effects. We investigate this further through the following three questions: (1) Are F1 and F2 influenced in the process of code-switching? (2) Are code-switched words hyper-articulated? (3) Does code-switching have an effect on vowel duration before voiced and voiceless consonants? Methodology: To address our research questions we relied on an insertional switching method where words from one language were inserted into carrier phrases of the other to simulate English–French code-switching environments. Bilingual speakers were recorded while they read code-switched sentences as well as sentences that did not involve code-switching, that is, monolingual sentences. Data and Analysis: The vowels of target words in the recorded utterances were compared – code-switched contexts against monolingual contexts – for vocalic duration, F0, F1 and F2. Findings/Conclusions: Like previous voice-onset time studies, our results indicate that code-switching does not shift the phonology to that of the embedded language. We did, however, find subtle lower level phonetic effects, especially in the French target words; we also found evidence of hyper-articulation in code-switched words. At the prosodic level, target switch-words approached the prosodic contours of the carrier phrases they are embedded in. Originality: The approach taken in this study is novel for its investigation of vowel properties instead of voice-onset time. Significance: This new approach to investigating code-switching adds to our understanding of how code-switching affects pronunciation.
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MacLeod, Andrea A. N., Ann Sutton, Natacha Trudeau, and Elin Thordardottir. "The acquisition of consonants in Québécois French: A cross-sectional study of pre-school aged children." International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 13, no. 2 (September 7, 2010): 93–109. http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/17549507.2011.487543.
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de Jesus Aguiar Pontes, Josafá, and Sadaoki Furui. "Predicting the phonetic realizations of word-final consonants in context – A challenge for French grapheme-to-phoneme converters." Speech Communication 52, no. 10 (October 2010): 847–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2010.06.007.
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SUNDARA, MEGHA, LINDA POLKA, and SHARI BAUM. "Production of coronal stops by simultaneous bilingual adults." Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 9, no. 1 (February 27, 2006): 97–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1366728905002403.
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This study investigated acoustic-phonetics of coronal stop production by adult simultaneous bilingual and monolingual speakers of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF). Differences in the phonetics of CF and CE include voicing and place of articulation distinctions. CE has a two-way voicing distinction (in syllable initial position) contrasting short-and long-lag VOT; coronal stops in CE are described as alveolar. CF also has a two-way voicing distinction, but contrasting lead and short-lag VOT; coronal stops in CF are described as dental. Acoustic analyses of stop consonants for both VOT and dental/alveolar place of articulation are reported. Results indicate that simultaneous bilingual as well as monolingual adults produce language-specific differences, albeit not in the same way, across CF and CE for voicing and place. Similarities and differences between simultaneous bilingual and monolingual adults are discussed to address phonological organization in simultaneous bilingual adults.
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Floccia, Caroline, Joseph Butler, Frédérique Girard, and Jeremy Goslin. "Categorization of regional and foreign accent in 5- to 7-year-old British children." International Journal of Behavioral Development 33, no. 4 (May 6, 2009): 366–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165025409103871.
Full textAbstract:
This study examines children's ability to detect accent-related information in connected speech. British English children aged 5 and 7 years old were asked to discriminate between their home accent from an Irish accent or a French accent in a sentence categorization task. Using a preliminary accent rating task with adult listeners, it was first verified that the level of accentedness was similar across the two unfamiliar accents. Results showed that whereas the younger children group behaved just above chance level in this task, the 7-year-old group could reliably distinguish between these variations of their own language, but were significantly better at detecting the foreign accent than the regional accent. These results extend and replicate a previous study (Girard, Floccia, & Goslin, 2008) in which it was found that 5-year-old French children could detect a foreign accent better than a regional accent. The factors underlying the relative lack of awareness for a regional accent as opposed to a foreign accent in childhood are discussed, especially the amount of exposure, the learnability of both types of accents, and a possible difference in the amount of vowels versus consonants variability, for which acoustic measures of vowel formants and plosives voice onset time are provided.