These results suggest that implementation of prosodic focus is affected by congenital visual deprivation. The authors discuss how these findings can be interpreted in the framework of the perception-for-action-control theory.
The influence of visual experience in speech production was investigated through a study of the French vowels /i y u a/. Articulatory and acoustic recordings of ten repetitions of the vowels in CVC syllables embedded in carrier sentences were conducted in three consonant environments (/b d g/) and two prosodic conditions (neutral and under contrastive emphasis). Six congenitally blind adults and six sighted adults were recorded. All participants were native speakers of Canadian French and had no history of speech disorder. The audio signal, lip movement, and tongue shapes were recorded using a digital camera and an ultrasound system. The minimal (for /i a/) or maximal (for /y u/) horizontal position of the upper lip was tracked and the front-back position of the tongue was measured for each vowel. Formant frequencies were extracted using LPC analyses. Results show that, despite similar acoustic differences, the rounded and unrounded vowels are less differentiated along the protrusion dimension for blind speakers compared to sighted speakers. It is suggested that this variability is related to a trade-off between lip protrusion and tongue position. Significant interaction effects between consonant environment and vowel category are discussed for each speaker group. [Work supported by SSHRC, NSERC.]
This paper aims at examining production of French speakers in marking focus-induced prominence at the articulatory and acoustic levels. The corpus consisted of CVC syllables, where C corresponds to one of the stops /p t k/ and V is one of the vowels /i a u/. Target words were embedded in carrier sentences elicited in two prosodic conditions: neutral (unfocused) and under contrastive focus. Four adult speakers (all native speakers of French) pronounced ten repetitions of each sequence. The audio signal and tongue shapes were recorded using a digital camera and a SONOSITE 180 ultrasound. Formant frequencies, rms values, duration, and tongue contours corresponding to each vowel were extracted. Analyses show that prosodic context has a significant effect on acoustic and articulatory data for all vowels, increasing F1 and F2 under contrastive focus, compared to the neutral context. However, this stable acoustic pattern is achieved by various articulatory strategies across subjects. For example, 2 subjects produced /u/ under focus with a lower tongue body than in the neutral context, whereas the remaining 2 subjects had a higher tongue body in focused syllables. Results are compared to previous studies on articulatory and acoustic correlates of prosodic structure in French and English.
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