Speech production is always accompanied by facial and gestural activity. The present study is part of a broader research project on how head movements and facial expressions are related to voice variations in different speech situations. Ten normal subjects were recorded while reading aloud, answering yes/no questions, and dialoguing with an interviewer. Rapid rising-falling eyebrow movements produced by the subjects as they spoke were associated with Fo rises in only 71% of the cases. This suggests that eyebrow movements and fundamental frequency changes are not automatically linked (i.e., they are not the result of muscular synergy), but are more a consequence of linguistic and communicational choices. Note also that 38% of the eyebrow movements were produced while the subject was not speaking. Thus, eyebrow movements may also serve as back-channel signals or play a role in turn-taking during conversation.
This paper investigates how and when interactional convergence is established by participants in conversation. We analyze sequences of storytelling using an original method that combines Conversation Analysis and a corpus-based approach. In storytelling, the participant in the position of “listener” is expected to produce either generic or specific responses adapted to the storyteller's narrative. The listener's behavior produced within the current activity is a cue of his/her interactional alignment. We show here that the listener can produce a specific type of (aligned) response, which we term a reported speech utterance in echo. The participant who is not telling the story is nonetheless able to animate the characters, while reversing the usual asymmetric roles of storyteller and listener. The use of this device is a way for the listener to display his/her stance toward the events told by the storyteller. If the listener's stance is congruent with that of the storyteller, this reveals a high degree of affiliation between the participants. We present seventeen excerpts from a collection of 94 instances of Echo Reported Speech (ERS) which we examined using the concepts of alignment and affiliation in order to show how different kinds of convergent sequences are constructed. We demonstrate that this phenomenon is mainly used by the listener to align and affiliate with the storyteller by means of reformulative, enumerative, or overbidding ERS. We also show that in affiliative sequences, reported speech can be used by the listener in a humorous way in order to temporarily disalign. This disalignment constitutes a potential starting point for an oblique sequence, which, if accepted and continued by the storyteller, gives rise to a highly convergent sequence.
Nous proposons de discuter des caractéristiques prosodiques du français sur la base d’une analyse métrique et perceptive de corpus de parole variés. Nos résultats nous conduisent à proposer le niveau du mot prosodique (pw) comme niveau de représentation de l’accentuation du français. Cette proposition forte, jusque-là jamais attestée empiriquement, est fondée sur deux résultats majeurs : la capacité des sujets à percevoir une proéminence finale indépendamment de la frontière intonative, à tous les niveaux de constituance ; la perception et le traitement de l’accentuation, notamment initiale, au niveau le plus bas de la constituance prosodique (pw) . La démarcation accentuelle bipolaire du mot lexical en surface nous invite à réinterpréter le statut de l’accentuation en français et à mettre en doute la notion de surdité accentuelle en français.
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