Oral

  • Martine ADDA-DECKER (Paris)
    French ‘liaison’ in casually spoken French, as investigated in a large corpus of casual French speech
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 113-128

    In this paper, the realisation of the French Liaison is investigated in a large corpus of casual speech. Considering that casual speech gives rise to a large range of pronunciation variants and that overall temporal reduction increases, one may hypothesize that French liaison tends to be less productive in this speaking style. We made use of automatic processing such as automatic speech alignments to evaluate when liaison is realized in the NCCFr corpus. Realized liaisons were examined and measured for the most frequent liaison consonants (/z/, /n/ and /t/) as a function of a liaison sites classified as mandatory, optional or forbidden. The relation between speech rate and liaison realization is also examined.


  • Martine ADDA-DECKER (Paris)
    Corpus for automatic transcription of spoken texts
    2007, Vol. XII-1, pp. 71-84

    This contribution aims at giving an overview of automatic speech recognition research, highlighting the needs for corpora development. As recognition systems largely rely on statistical approaches, large amounts of both spoken and written corpora are required. In order to fill the gap between written and spoken language, speech transcripts need to be produced manually using appropriate tools. Methods and resources accumulated over the years now allow, not only to tackle genuine oral genres, but also to envision large-scale corpus studies to increase our knowledge of spoken language, as well as to improve automatic processing.


  • Odile BAGOU (Genève, Suisse)
    Lexical alignment and segmentation in speech recognition
    2002, Vol. VII-1, pp. 67-82

    How do listeners segment the continuous speech input into words? This paper addresses this important question by reviewing current views of lexical segmentation. After providing some background to the more general problem of spoken word recognition, we examine the different cues - including phonetic, phonological, prosodic, and lexical cues - that have been shown to play a role in speech segmentation. We then analyze how these cues are used to locate alignment points in the continuous speech signal. These points serve to define what parts of the signal are matched with which representations in the mental lexicon. Several solutions to the alignment problem are discussed in light of existing experimental evidence.


  • Mireille BILGER (Perpignan)
    Some thoughts on spontaneous spoken French
    1999, Vol. IV-2, pp. 21-30

    After reviewing certain customary considerations concerning the written-spoken division, the present paper attempts to demonstrate that when we take into account the data provided by French corpora we are obliged to qualify the terms of the contrast and to considerer in a new light the relations between language users and their language.


  • Mylène BLASCO-DULBECCO (Clermont-Ferrand)
    Proven relationships between data and analysis
    1999, Vol. IV-2, pp. 31-40

    More often than not, oral data differ from written data both from a frequential and distributional point of view. They lead to a sharpening of the description as they supply us with construction characteristics or contexts that do not exist in writing.Dislocations and the form 'il y a', known to be lavishly used in the oral language, provide us with often predictable examples regarding their distributional characteristics as well as their function in textual dynamics.Although 'certains' as a subject is not much used in spoken language, its offers a variety of distribution facts which are also clearly divided and actually related to the kind of observed corpus.The following article therefore aims at presenting us with three case studies that are representative of the relationship between data and analysis.


  • Hélène BLONDEAU (Floride, Etats-Unis)
    No salvation outside THE norm ? The Montreal study of variations in hypothetical si-clauses
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 55-66

    Through the panel study of twelve Montrealers from 1971 to 1995, this article examines the variation between the conditional and the imperfect morphology in hypothetical si-clauses. The two variants, well in place in the spoken French implicit norms system, are in opposition when given values in the normative debate. The analysis indicates the influence of the distance and the event potentiality. Due to vacillations in usage frequency according to the year, the study cannot confirm the hypothesis of a change in favor of the conditional morphology. This case study documents the individual variation across the lifespan and its connection to community change.


  • Galina BOUBNOVA (Moscou, Russie)
    Phonetic correctness: the case of the teaching of French to Russophone learners and Russian to French learners
    2006, Vol. XI-1, pp. 7-19

    In learning the phonetics of a foreign language an adult student takes in new sounds still sustaining the definitive influence of the phonological categorization of his or her mother tongue. In Russia phonetic correction mainly makes use of such methods as visual display as well as tactile and motive drills aimed at developing articulation. By making pronunciation subordinate to myoneural control that procedure virtually disregards the prosodic component of the speech. Teaching foreign language prosody as presented in this article is based on the fact that a student cannot only hear but also see the appropriate audio signal. The use of the visual channel enhances work on the prosody of a language to be studied both at the stage of its perception and at the stage of production.


  • Philippe BOULA DE MAREÜIL (Paris Sud)
    Diachronic variation in the prosody of French news announcer speech: changes in word initial accent
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 97-111

    This study addresses prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically, focusing on word-initial stress, which may give an impression of emphatic style. Objective measurements suggest that the following features have decreased since the forties: mean pitch, pitch rise associated with initial stress, and vowel duration characterising an emphatic initial stress. The onsets of stressed initial syllables have become longer while speech rate (measured at the phonemic level) has not changed. This puzzling outcome raises interesting questions for research on French prosody, suggesting that the durational correlates of word-initial stress have changed over time, in the French news announcer style.


  • Suzanne BURGER (Munich, Allemagne)
    RVG1 - A prototype for the collection of current spoken German
    1998, Vol. III-1, pp. 67-79

    This article describes ideas of the project "Collection of Currently Spoken German". This project is presently planned at the Institute of Phonetics at Munich University. The aim of the project is to collect aspects of currently spoken German by means of a static network of recording stations distributed all over the German speaking area. The RVG1 (Regional Variants of German) corpus serves as a prototype for regionally covered speech data. It can be seen as a first small database of regionally covered recordings of German representing the most common dialectal regions or at least all those regions which could be important for categorizing regional variants into broader classes. RVG1 contains read numbers, phonetically rich sentences and computer commands as well as spontaneous speech. Some features of this corpus will be introduced and discussed.


  • Sylvain DETEY (Tokyo, Japon)
    Learners of French and pronunciation norms in the FL : what input do we need to reach what results
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 81-96

    In the field of French language education, the developments of corpus linguistics have spurred a reassessment of the importance of pedagogical norms and linguistic variation in teaching curricula. In this article, we focus on the phonetic-phonological dimension of the teaching/learning process and, after a short glance at pronunciation models in French, we examine the impact of sociolinguistic descriptions of varieties of French on pronunciation education. Referring to the notions of 'errors' and 'accents' among non-native speakers, we point out the need for broad and systematic corpus-based studies, comparable with native databases. Finally, we introduce the InterPhonologie du français contemporain project and look at the notion of non-native norms, both from theoretical and applied perspectives.


  • Jacques DURAND (Toulouse)
    Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structures
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 25-37

    The PAC project (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure) aims at giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and its geographical, social and stylistic diversity. Based on Labovian methods, the project seeks to describe both rhotic and non rhotic accents of English, from traditional standards to more recent postcolonial varieties. This large corpus enables researchers to analyse and compare intervarietal features such as rhoticity as well as more specific phenomena such as vocalic length in Australian English or variable rhoticity in New Zealand English. Today LVTI, a collaborative project aiming at an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic survey of great urban centres such as Manchester and Toulouse is being set up following the PAC/PFC classical protocol.


  • Julien EYCHENNE (Groningue, Pays-Bas)
    The Phonology of Contemporary French program: results and perspective
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 7-24

    This paper offers an overview of the work that has been done within the Phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés, structure (PFC) research programme. We first critically assess the relation between phonological research and data. We then move on to describe PFC's methodology and the coding schemes that have been devised for the analysis of schwa and liaison. We finish off by showing how the PFC programme makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phonology of French, by widening the scope and breadth of empirical descriptions and by offering new insights into theoretical problems such as the analysis of liaison or the role of usage frequency in grammar.


  • Françoise GADET (Paris Ouest)
    A large corpus of spoken French : CIEL-F. Epistemological choices and empirical outcome
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 39-54

    This article presents the structure of the Corpus International Ecologique de la Langue Française, an extensive corpus of spoken French that will soon be available on the Internet, from both an epistemological and empirical perspective. Explanations are given with regard to the ideas that guided the data collection (ecological approach, comparability of the different areas of the Francophonie and communication situations) and to the choices made ("communicative spaces" and "activity types") with a view to relevant analyses in various research fields (variation, interaction, multimodality, French in contact, oral syntax) and an attempt is made to fill existing gaps in the current corpus. The article further addresses the issue of building up a network of experts, problems that had to be solved during fieldwork in the different areas and questions concerning standardisation, archiving and publication of the collected data (audio and video recordings, transcriptions, metadata), whereupon several examples are presented for comparative analyses.


  • Sébastien GEORGES (Centre international d’études pédagogiques, Sèvres)
    Evaluate oral production by means of a scientific proocedure
    2013, Vol. XVIII-1, pp. 47-58

    In this paper we propose a methodology for designing and administering a test of speaking in conditions that are of the highest importance for the testees. With examples of high stake assessments where speaking is not the only ability measured, we will demonstrate how a rigorous and scientific approach offers advantages to the test in terms of validity, reliability, sensitivity and equity. We will also examine how the adepts of this approach are an appropriate answer to the initial request and to the expectation of the final users. The benefits for the stakeholders will also reviewed.


  • Juana GIL FERNÁNDEZ (Madrid, Espagne)
    The teaching of pronunciation: the widening gap between fundamental research and classroom practice
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 67-80

    In recent times, in the academic field related to the training of L2 pronunciation teachers, the already existing gap between fundamental research and the application of its results in the classroom has widened. In some degree, this has been a consequence of that training being focused on methodological aspects more than on the intrinsic knowledge of the subject to be taught. In this article, on the basis of two concrete examples, the need for keeping pronunciation teachers permanently informed about the findings of the basic research in phonetics / phonology is defended as a means to achieve a very fruitful interaction between the two sides, theoretical ad applied, of the discipline.


  • Catherine KERBRAT-ORECCHIONI (Lyon 2)
    Oral language in interaction: restricted freedom
    1999, Vol. IV-2, pp. 41-55

    In this article, the author begins by mentioning three basic properties of oral discourse (two of them contrasting drastically oral discourse with written discourse) : 1. usally, it is fresh talk, 2. which is built collectively, 3. and which is governed by different kinds of rules. Then she shows that the application of these rules gives rise to negotiations between participants, giving some examples of such negociation mechanisms (concerning the negotiation of the words that are exchanged, the script of the interaction, and the interpersonal relationship). As a conclusion, she emphasizes the necessity of studying oral discourse as an interactive achievement.


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  • Philippe MARTIN (Toronto, Canada)
    Intonation in spontaneous speech
    1999, Vol. IV-2, pp. 57-75

    The description of intonation is particularly difficult for spontaneous speech, due to the extreme variability of data. This forced many phoneticians to describe intonation through the use of sophisticated statistic tools, whereas phonologists convinced themselves to use reductive transcription tools such as ToBI. We show here that intonation models built for read speech data can be used successfully for the analysis of spontaneous speech, which after all uses the same linguistic code as read speech production. The experimental data presented illustrate the diversity of speaker strategies to orally structure their sentences, still using the same prosodic rules specific to French as in read speech conditions.


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  • Johan F. MATTER (Amsterdam, Pays-Bas)
    Authentic pronunciation in a Foreign Language: a neglected problem
    2006, Vol. XI-1, pp. 21-32

    This article addresses the problem why authentic pronunciation in a foreign language, contrary to other aptitudes in that same language, is so difficult, if not altogether impossible, to achieve. The problem is addressed from different theoretical perspectives: psycholinguistics, physiology and psychology. The approach by Guiora seems so far the most complete and the most promising. The problem of the necessity or the desirability of authentic pronunciation from a teaching point of view is not addressed. The article finishes on the question whether in the global village in which we live, the role of authentic pronunciation will not necessarily change in nature.


  • Jim MILLER (Edimbourg, Grande-Bretagne)
    Magnasyntax and syntactic analysis
    1999, Vol. IV-2, pp. 7-20

    Theoretical work in syntax is based mainly on written language. This means that theories of first language acquisition such as the Chomskyan one are based on a model of syntax relating to written language. But children acquire spontaneous spoken language first and only later learn written language. In spite of recent intensive research on spontaneous spoken language even analysts who distinguish planned and unplanned language and different dimensions of syntax and lexis fail to recognise the extent of the syntactic differences between formal written language and spontaneous unplanned spoken language. Ong proposed the label 'magnavocabulary' for the store of lexical items to be found in written texts composed in any language with a long written history. 'Magnasyntax' is proposed as a label for the parallel syntactic phenomenon; constructions from written texts are recorded in grammars and can be used/revived by writers and analysed by grammarians. Much syntactic theory focuses on magnasyntax. This focus on magnasyntax and the failure to distinguish constructions from different periods of a given language and from different genres is illustrated in two pieces of work on English syntax, Van der Auwera's discussion of whether 'that' introducing relative clauses is a complementiser or pronoun and Quirk and Greenbaum's discussion of IT clefts.


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  • Berthille PALLAUD (Aix-en-Provence)
    Methods for evaluating speech production in children
    2001, Vol. VI-1, pp. 121-135

    One of the main problems in establishing linguistic dysfunctioning resides in the definition of the 'comparison group'. The numerous studies today in the domain of oral proficiency, have shown that comparing oral with written language production can seriously bias the outcome. As for children's speech, the evaluation is sometimes even more seriously biased by what may be called 'adultocentrism', which allows to conclude too hastily and/or erroneously for language dysfunctioning. In this article we want to show what can be considered as common errors in oral language proficiency of children, and what might be indicative of more specific problems.


  • André VALLI (Aix-en-Provence)
    Grammatical labeling of corpora of spoken language: problems and perspectives
    1999, Vol. IV-2, pp. 113-133

    The use of transcription conventions that attempt to code the specific properties of speech, such as false starts, hesitations, and repetitions, and do not rely on the usual written punctuation, suggests that the grammatical tagging of transcribed oral corpora might be a very difficult undertaking. Developing speech-specific taggers, although desirable, would be a long-term project. In the experiment reported in this article, a spoken corpus was tagged using a system designed for written text, along with some appropriate pre-editing and post-editing programs. Quite unexpectedly, the results for speech were excellent, almost as good as those previously obtained for writing. This discovery allows us to foresee the rapid compilation of large tagged spoken corpora for French.