PAC Toulouse | April 13, 2015




Vowel acquisition
in French-English interphonology





Adrien Méli | adrienmeli@gmail.com


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Theory

Models Predictions

Classic SLA Models

  • Native Language Model (Kuhl, Conboy, Coffey-Corina, et al., 2008)
  • Ontology & Phylogeny Model (Major, 2001)
  • Speech Learning Model
  • Perceptual Assimilation Model

All these models have one thing in common:

French English Predictions
/i/ /ɪ - i ː/ Difficult acquisition
/u/ /ʊ - u ː/ Difficult acquisition

Only the phonemic structures in the source and target languages matter.

Outside SLA

  • Exemplar theories / Frequency of use (Bybee, 2010; Pierrehumbert, 2001)
  • Prosodic positions (Keating, Cho, Fougeron, et al., 2004)
  • Phonetic processing depends on frequency (White, Yee, Blumstein, et al., 2013)
  • Phonological neighbourhood (Middleton and Schwartz, 2010; Chan and Vitevitch, 2010)

Data

Corpus

50 recordings of learners' spontaneous speech, as part of the LONGDALE project (Goutéraux, 2013).

Learners were first and second year students, recorded four times over six-month intervals.

  • 10 female students following a course in English at Université Paris-Diderot over 3 sessions (=30 recordings)
  • 3 male students and 2 other female students (=20 recordings).

Workflow (1/2)

PRAAT: (Boersma, 2001)

Workflow (2/2)

SPPAS: (Bigi, 2012)

Data

fileappend 'outputfile$' 'speaker$' 'tab$' 'session$' 'tab$' 'currentWord$'
'tab$' 'searchedPron$' 'tab$' 'ukphoneme$' 'tab$' 'nucleus$' 'tab$'
'currentUKSyll$' 'tab$' 'syllStruc$' 'tab$' 'frenchSyll$' 'tab$' 'eStruc$'
'tab$' 'fStruc$' 'tab$' 'ess$' 'tab$' 'fss$' 'tab$' 'stress$' 'tab$'
'startOfInt' 'tab$' 'meanIntensity' 'tab$' 'vF0s' 'tab$' 'vF0m' 'tab$'
'vF0e' 'tab$''vF1s' 'tab$' 'vF2s' 'tab$' 'vF3s' 'tab$' 'vF4s' 'tab$'
'vF1m' 'tab$' 'vF2m' 'tab$' 'vF3m' 'tab$' 'vF4m' 'tab$''vF1e' 'tab$'
'vF2e' 'tab$' 'vF3e' 'tab$' 'vF4e' 'tab$' 'durOfInt' 'tab$' 'phonBef$'
'tab$' 'preCoArt$' 'tab$' 'befVce$' 'tab$' 'befMoA$' 'tab$' 'befPoA$'
'tab$' 'phonAft$' 'tab$' 'postCoArt$' 'tab$' 'aftVce$' 'tab$' 'aftMoA$'
'tab$' 'aftPoA$' 'tab$' 'epenthetic$' 'tab$' 'durationOfSound' 'tab$'
'syllCount' 'tab$' 'freq' 'newline$'
  • a 47 x 45,261 spreadsheet
  • 35,808 monophthongs

Master TextGrid

Description

Monophthongs

S001 S002 S003 S004 Total
æ 566 972 955 519 3012
ɘ 1191 1849 1857 849 5746
ɜː 431 719 713 289 2152
ɑː 379 542 606 247 1774
e 685 832 940 437 2894
1117 1423 1543 607 4690
ɪ 1563 2303 2402 865 7133
ɔː 398 556 585 220 1759
635 903 888 599 3025
ʊ 110 222 272 72 676
ʌ 555 883 1084 425 2947
Total 7630 11204 11845 5129 35808

Per-session phoneme count

Phonemic evolution over four years

  • French: (Gendrot and Adda-Decker, 2005)
  • English: (Wells, 2008)

F1 Dispersion across all sessions

F2 Dispersion across all sessions

Evolution of F1 Standard deviations

Evolution of F2 Standard deviations

Evolution of Euclidian distances

Analysis

Hypotheses

NULL HYPOTHESIS:

F1 and F2 formants only depend on the chosen phoneme (here: iː ɪ, uː or ʊ).

H1: other parameters influence F1 and F2.

Linear models

F-stat. df1 df2 Adj. R² p-value
F1~PHON 128.637038 3 20210 0.0185916 0
F2~PHON 1233.696209 3 20210 0.1546600 0
F1~FrCV 207.690773 1 20212 0.0101221 0
F2~FrCV 200.227081 1 20212 0.0097602 0
F1~BrCV 166.714916 1 20212 0.0081318 0
F2~BrCV 199.536542 1 20212 0.0097267 0
F1~WORD 1.903967 1075 19138 0.0458709 0
F2~WORD 8.576075 1075 19138 0.2872025 0

Conclusion

Other parameters than phonemic structure seem to be at play when acquiring a contrast.

WIP

To-do list

  • Expand data.
  • Assess alignment accuracy.
  • Handle outliers (interquartile values?).
  • Normalize, and repeat study with normalized values.
  • Add other parameters (e.g. stress, CELEX frequencies...).

U-Penn P2FA

P2FA: (Yuan and Liberman, 2008)

References

[1] C. T. Best. "A direct realist view of cross-language speech perception". In: Speech perception and linguistic experience: Theoretical and methodological issues. Ed. by W. Strange. Baltimore: York Press, 1995, pp. 171-204.

[2] B. Bigi. "SPPAS: A tool for the phonetic segmentations of speech". In: Proc. of LREC 2012. Ed. by LREC. 2012, pp. 1748-1755.

[3] P. Boersma. "Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer". In: Glot International 5.9/10 (2001), pp. 341-345.

[4] J. Bybee. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

[5] K. Y. Chan and M. S. Vitevitch. "Network Structure Influences Speech Production". In: Cognitive Science 34 (2010), pp. 685-697.

[6] J. Flege. "Second-language Speech Learning: Theory, Findings, and Problems". In: Speech Perception and Linguistic Experience: Issues in cross-language research. Ed. by W. Strange. Timonium, MD: York Press, 1995, pp. 233-277.

[7] C. Gendrot and M. Adda-Decker. "Impact of duration on F1/F2 formant values of oral vowels: an automatic a nalysis of large broadcast news corpora in French and German". In: Proceedings Eurospeech. Ed. by Eurospeech. 2005, pp. 2453-2456.

[8] P. Goutéraux. "Learners of English and Conversational Proficiency". In: 20 Years of Corpus Research: Looking back, Moving ahead (Corpora and Language in Use 1). Ed. by S. Granger, G. Gilquin and F. Meunier. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2013.

[9] P. Keating, T. Cho, C. Fougeron, et al. "Domain-initial articulatory strengthening in four languages." In: Papers in Laboratory Phonology VI : Phonetic interpretation. Ed. by J. Local, R. Ogden and R. Temple. Cambridge: CUP, 2004, pp. 145-163.

[10] P. K. Kuhl, B. T. Conboy, S. Coffey-Corina, et al. "Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: new data and native language magnet theory expanded ( NLM-e)". In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363 (2008), pp. 979-1000.

[11] R. Major. Foreign Accent: The Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Second Language Phonology. Second Language Acquisition Research Series. Taylor & Francis, 2001. ISBN: 9781410604293.

[12] E. Middleton and M. Schwartz. " Density pervades: an analysis of phonological neighbourhood den- sity effects in aphasic speakers with different types of naming impairment." In: _ Cognitive Neuropsychology _ 27 (5) (2010), pp. 401-427.

[13] J. B. Pierrehumbert. "Exemplar dynamics: Word frequency, lenition, and contrast". In: Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Ed. by J. L. Bybee and P. Hopper. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001, pp. 137-157.

[14] J. Wells. Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. London: Pearson Longman, 2008.

[15] K. White, E. Yee, S. Blumstein, et al. "Adults show less sensitivity to phonetic detail in unfamiliar words, too." In: Journal of Memory and Language 68 (2013), pp. 362-378.

[16] J. Yuan and M. Liberman. "Speaker identification on the SCOTUS corpus." In: _Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, _ 123(5) (2008), pp. 5687-5690.

Thank you!

Adrien Méli | adrienmeli@gmail.com