No abstract

International audienceWithin the Autosegmental-Metrical approach to French intonation, two levels of phrasing are generally accepted, the Accentual Phrase (AP) and the Intonation Phrase (IP), while the existence of an intermediate level, i.e., the intermediate phrase or ip, is controversial. Our data provide strong evidence for the existence of the ip by uncovering systematic pitch scaling effects associated with the right edge of this constituent. We first show that the presence of an ip-break is responsible for blocking recursive downstep of subsequent AP-final LH* rises in declarative utterances, causing the return of the H target to the pitch level set by the first accentual peak of the phrase (i.e., complete reset). This mechanism is claimed to result from control over the reference pitch level for the entire ip, which can alternatively be modeled through secondary association of the last pitch accent of the domain. We also report on duration evidence pointing to the existence of preboundary lengthening associated to the last syllable of the ip. Finally, we provide additional evidence for the internal structuring of the Intonation Phrase by reporting data on partial reset occurring on the first H peak following the ip boundary.

Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) often display social cognition disorders, including Theory of Mind (ToM) impairments and communication disruptions. Thought language disorders appear to be primarily a disruption of pragmatics, SZ can also experience difficulties at other linguistic levels including the prosodic one. Here, using an interactive paradigm, we showed that SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode the contrastive status of discourse referents in French. We used a semi-spontaneous task to elicit noun-adjective pairs in which the noun in the second noun-adjective fragment was identical to the noun in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron “brown candies” vs. BONBONS violets “purple candies”) or could contrast with it (e.g., BOUGIES violettes “purple candles” vs. BONBONS violets “purple candies”). We found that healthy controls parsed the target noun in the second noun-adjective fragment separately from the color adjective, to warn their interlocutor that this noun constituted a contrastive entity (e.g., BOUGIES violettes followed by [BONBONS] [violets]) compared to when it referred to the same object as in the first fragment (e.g., BONBONS marron followed by [BONBONS violets]). On the contrary, SZ individuals did not use prosodic phrasing to encode contrastive status of target nouns. In addition, SZ's difficulties to use prosody of contrast were correlated to their score in a classical ToM task (i.e., the hinting task). Taken together, our data provide evidence that SZ patients exhibit difficulties to prosodically encode discourse statuses and sketch a potential relationship between ToM and the use of linguistic prosody.