Avanzi, Mathieu

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.

2013, Dubosson, Pauline, Schwab, Sandra, Avanzi, Mathieu

The aim of this study is to examine some prosodic features of a variety of L2 French commonly called "français fédéral", which is a variety of French spoken by people who have a Swiss German dialect as L1. We compared the data of 4 groups of 4 speakers: 2 groups of French native speakers (from Neuchâtel in Switzerland and from Paris) and 2 groups of 4 Swiss German French speakers (from Bern and Zurich but living in Neuchâtel for at least 20 years). The data were semi-automatically processed. We examined two prosodic properties: articulation rate and accentuation. Our findings suggest that: (i) native speakers from Paris articulate faster than native speakers from Neuchâtel; (ii) non-native speakers articulate as fast as the native speakers of the corresponding variety; (iii) "français fédéral" shares several features with a lexical accentuation system rather than with a supra-lexical accentuation system.

2012, Schwab, Sandra, Avanzi, Mathieu, Goldman, Jean-Philippe, Montchaud, Pascal, Racine, Isabelle

The aim of this paper is to provide an acoustical account of penultimate accentuation in some varieties of French. We compare stretches of spontaneous speech produced by 8 Swiss speakers (4 Neuchâtel speakers and 4 Wallis speakers, hereafter "regional varieties") with the productions of a group of 4 Parisian speakers (hereafter "standard variety"). The results of our study show that penultimate accentuation is less frequent in Parisian French than in the Swiss varieties. More interestingly, the study reveals that the phenomenon has different acoustic correlates not only between the standard variety and the regional varieties, but also within the two regional varieties: while Wallis speakers tend to be closer to Parisian speakers using melodic cues to mark their penultimate syllable as prominent, speakers from Neuchâtel tend to prefer using durational cues to do so.