In this article, I present the tonal system of Central African French (CAF), which is the variety of French spoken in Bangui in the Central African Republic. The study is based on a corpus of recordings of spontaneous speech produced by twelve multilingual speakers, using mainly the African language Sango and French in their every-day communication. I show that the tonal system of CAF is to a great extent influenced by the phonological system of Sango.

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.

Using research tools like PRAAT, a tool for doing phonetics, SPPAS, which performs automatic annotation, and the AixOx learners’ corpus, this article gives examples of possible pedagogical applications to help the learning and teaching of English prosody for French learners in secondary schools. The theoretical framework is the British school of intonation and the illustrations concern the three types of decision the speaker has to take, namely tonality, tonicity and tone.It is argued that visualising and comparing natives and learners’ productions can induce a better comprehension and apprehension of prosodic phenomena for ESL.

Through analysis of adult-deaf child and adult-SLI child interaction, and after the presentation of the theoretical frame and aims of Interactive Developmental Intonology, we try to better understand the importance of prosody in early language acquisition. Our research focuses on suprasegmental development - rhythmical and melodic organization in the interaction -, and its effects on conversational and linguistic competences of handicapped children. Which are the conditions for sounds to become a canonical sentence? How a prelinguistic utterance, without words, can nevertheless have a linguistic modality?