Rousier-Vercruyssen, Lucie

2018-2-20, Fossard, Marion, Achim, Amélie, Rousier-Vercruyssen, Lucie, Gonzalez, Sylvia, Bureau, Alexandre, Champagne-Lavau, Maud

During a narrative discourse, accessibility of the referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as the discourse unfolds, depending on the presence and prominence of the other referents. This leads the speaker to use various referential expressions to refer to the main protagonists of the story at different moments in the narrative. This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referential contexts. Referential complexity of the stories was manipulated through variations in the number of characters (1 vs. 2) and, for stories in which there were two characters, in their ambiguity in gender (different vs. same gender). Data were coded for the type of reference markers as well as the type of reference content (i.e. the extent of the information provided in the referential expression). Results showed that, beyond the expected effects of discourse stages on reference markers (more indefinite markers at the introduction stage, more pronouns at the maintaining stage, and more definite markers at the shift stage), the number of characters and their ambiguity in gender also modulated speakers’ referential choices at specific discourse stages, For the maintaining stage, an effect of the number of characters was observed for the use of pronouns and of definite markers, with more pronouns when there was a single character, sometimes replaced by definite expressions when two characters were present in the story. For the shift stage, an effect of gender ambiguity was specifically noted for the reference content with more specific information provided in the referential expression when there was referential ambiguity. Reference content is an aspect of referential marking that is rarely addressed in a narrative context, yet it revealed a quite flexible referential behavior by the speakers.

2013-8-30, Avanzi, Mathieu, Rousier-Vercruyssen, Lucie, Gonzalez, Sylvia, Fossard, Marion, Schwab, Sandra

The aim of this paper is to describe C-PROM-Task, a dataset created and annotated in the same spirit as C-PROM [1]. CPROM-Task was annotated following a perceptually-based and computer-assisted procedure for the study of syllabic prominences, syllabic disfluences and two ranges of prosodic units. All told, C-PROM-Task comprises recordings and annotated TextGrids of story-telling by 20 native French speakers from Switzerland. The entire dataset is 2 hours 20 minutes long. Some observations are also made regarding accentuation (prominence rate), disfluence rate and phrasing (length of prosodic units) in the corpus.

2018, Fossard, Marion, Achim, Amélie M., Rousier-Vercruyssen, Lucie, Gonzalez, Sylvia, Bureau, Alexandre, Champagne-Lavau, Maud

During a narrative discourse, accessibility of the referents is rarely fixed once and for all. Rather, each referent varies in accessibility as the discourse unfolds, depending on the presence and prominence of the other referents. This leads the speaker to use various referential expressions to refer to the main protagonists of the story at different moments in the narrative. This study relies on a new, collaborative storytelling in sequence task designed to assess how speakers adjust their referential choices when they refer to different characters at specific discourse stages corresponding to the introduction, maintaining, or shift of the character in focus, in increasingly complex referential contexts. Referential complexity of the stories was manipulated through variations in the number of characters (1 vs. 2) and, for stories in which there were two characters, in their ambiguity in gender (different vs. same gender). Data were coded for the type of reference markers as well as the type of reference content (i.e., the extent of the information provided in the referential expression). Results showed that, beyond the expected effects of discourse stages on reference markers (more indefinite markers at the introduction stage, more pronouns at the maintaining stage, and more definite markers at the shift stage), the number of characters and their ambiguity in gender also modulated speakers' referential choices at specific discourse stages, For the maintaining stage, an effect of the number of characters was observed for the use of pronouns and of definite markers, with more pronouns when there was a single character, sometimes replaced by definite expressions when two characters were present in the story. For the shift stage, an effect of gender ambiguity was specifically noted for the reference content with more specific information provided in the referential expression when there was referential ambiguity. Reference content is an aspect of referential marking that is rarely addressed in a narrative context, yet it revealed a quite flexible referential behavior by the speakers.

2017-9-7, Rousier-Vercruyssen, Lucie, Gonzalez, Sylvia, Achim, Amélie