Prosodic boundary strength guides syntactic parsing of French utterances

Michelas, Amandine; D’Imperio, Mariapaola

doi:10.1515/lp-2015-0003

Cited by 17 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Since we expected the distinction between the all-focus + subject-internal and narrow-focus + subject-internal conditions to be manifest through a combination of both f0 and duration, this result is somewhat surprising. Nevertheless, this supports a recent proposal by Michelas and D'Imperio (2015) that "the relative weight of each type of cue depends on the level of the prosodic constituent in the hierarchy" (p. 142). In two perception experiments, the authors of that study asked participants to complete noun phrases (e.g., La nana du sauna "The girl who manages the sauna") which ended with either an AP or an ip boundary.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Focus Marking and Prosodic Boundary Strength in French

Michelas¹,

German²

2019

Phonetica

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Background/Aims: In French, the size of a focus constituent is not reliably marked through pitch accent assignment as in many stress accent languages. While it has been argued that the distribution of lower-level prosodic boundaries plays a role, this is at best a weak cue to focus, leaving open the question of whether other marking strategies are available. In this study, we assess whether the right edge of a contrastive focus constituent is marked by differences in prosodic boundary strength. Methods: We elicited utterances with target words in six combinations of focus and syntactic contexts using an interactive production task. Results: The results show that if a given location is realized as an accentual phrase boundary in an all-focus context, then it is realized as an intermediate phrase boundary when it coincides with the right edge of a narrow-focus constituent. A location that is an intermediate phrase boundary in an all-focus context, however, remains unchanged under narrow focus. Conclusion: These findings suggest that focus constituents are constrained to align with a minimum prosodic domain size in French (i.e., the intermediate phrase), and that French does not rely on a general strategy of prosodic enhancement for marking focus.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Focus Marking and Prosodic Boundary Strength in French

Michelas¹,

German²

2019

Phonetica

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“…Secondary accents, though not obligatory, can be found toward the left edge of an AP, depending on the number of syllables and on the lexical composition of the phrase (e.g., Astésano, 2001 ; Welby, 2003 , 2006 ). Hence, accent placement in French is tightly linked to grouping and phrasing, and, ultimately, to syntactic segmentation (e.g., Millotte et al, 2008 ; Michelas and D'Imperio, 2015 ). Importantly, compared to German, stress conflicts between words and phrases such as stress clash and shift (e.g., Mengel, 2000 ; Bohn et al, 2013 ) are more rare (Post, 2000 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory-Motor Rhythms and Speech Processing in French and German Listeners

2017

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Moving to a speech rhythm can enhance verbal processing in the listener by increasing temporal expectancies (Falk and Dalla Bella, 2016). Here we tested whether this hypothesis holds for prosodically diverse languages such as German (a lexical stress-language) and French (a non-stress language). Moreover, we examined the relation between motor performance and the benefits for verbal processing as a function of language. Sixty-four participants, 32 German and 32 French native speakers detected subtle word changes in accented positions in metrically structured sentences to which they previously tapped with their index finger. Before each sentence, they were cued by a metronome to tap either congruently (i.e., to accented syllables) or incongruently (i.e., to non-accented parts) to the following speech stimulus. Both French and German speakers detected words better when cued to tap congruently compared to incongruent tapping. Detection performance was predicted by participants' motor performance in the non-verbal cueing phase. Moreover, tapping rate while participants tapped to speech predicted detection differently for the two language groups, in particular in the incongruent tapping condition. We discuss our findings in light of the rhythmic differences of both languages and with respect to recent theories of expectancy-driven and multisensory speech processing.

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“…The fact that French only has phrase-final stress appears to have an impact on stress pattern discrimination by French-speaking adults: compared to both Spanish and German adults, French speakers show a reduced sensitivity to stress (that has sometimes been called “stress deafness”) when processing either words presented in isolation ( Dupoux et al, 1997 , 2001 ) or continuous sequences made up of nonsense syllables or nonlinguistic sounds ( Bhatara et al, 2013 , 2015 ; Boll-Avetisyan et al, 2015 ). This reduced sensitivity in French adults (which does not prevent them to use phrase boundaries as cues for segmentation, Michelas and D’Imperio, 2015 ) is particularly marked when the stimuli presented are characterized by speaker or segmental variability, suggesting that crosslinguistic differences emerge in experimental contexts in which the stimuli need to be processed at a phonological level, rather than at an acoustic or phonetic level.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Prosodic Acquisition in Bilingual Infants: The Case of the Perceptual Trochaic Bias

2016

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Infants start learning the prosodic properties of their native language before 12 months, as shown by the emergence of a trochaic bias in English-learning infants between 6 and 9 months (Jusczyk et al., 1993), and in German-learning infants between 4 and 6 months (Höhle et al., 2009, 2014), while French-learning infants do not show a bias at 6 months (Höhle et al., 2009). This language-specific emergence of a trochaic bias is supported by the fact that English and German are languages with trochaic predominance in their lexicons, while French is a language with phrase-final lengthening but lacking lexical stress. We explored the emergence of a trochaic bias in bilingual French/German infants, to study whether the developmental trajectory would be similar to monolingual infants and whether amount of relative exposure to the two languages has an impact on the emergence of the bias. Accordingly, we replicated Höhle et al. (2009) with 24 bilingual 6-month-olds learning French and German simultaneously. All infants had been exposed to both languages for 30 to 70% of the time from birth. Using the Head Preference Procedure, infants were presented with two lists of stimuli, one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /GAba/ with word-initial stress (trochaic pattern), the second one made up of several occurrences of the pseudoword /gaBA/ with word-final stress (iambic pattern). The stimuli were recorded by a native German female speaker. Results revealed that these French/German bilingual 6-month-olds have a trochaic bias (as evidenced by a preference to listen to the trochaic pattern). Hence, their listening preference is comparable to that of monolingual German-learning 6-month-olds, but differs from that of monolingual French-learning 6-month-olds who did not show any preference (Höhle et al., 2009). Moreover, the size of the trochaic bias in the bilingual infants was not correlated with their amount of exposure to German. The present results thus establish that the development of a trochaic bias in simultaneous bilinguals is not delayed compared to monolingual German-learning infants (Höhle et al., 2009) and is rather independent of the amount of exposure to German relative to French.

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Prosodic boundary strength guides syntactic parsing of French utterances

Cited by 17 publications

References 27 publications

Focus Marking and Prosodic Boundary Strength in French

Focus Marking and Prosodic Boundary Strength in French

Auditory-Motor Rhythms and Speech Processing in French and German Listeners

Early Prosodic Acquisition in Bilingual Infants: The Case of the Perceptual Trochaic Bias

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