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Comparaison de deux marqueurs d’affirmation dans des séquences de co-construction: voilà et genau
(2016)
This contribution investigates the German response particle genau and the French response particle voilà within collaborative turn sequences in videotaped ordinary conversations. Adopting a conversation analytic approach to cross-linguistic comparison, I will show that the basic epistemic value of both particles allows them to be used in similar sequential environments. When a co-participant formulates a candidate conclusion in environments where it can be easily inferred from previous talk, first speakers may confirm the adequacy of the pre-emptive completion by voilà or genau. These particles may then also be followed by self- or other-repeats. The analyses aim to illustrate that participants rely on a variety of practices in order to positively assess a pre-emptive completion, and to refute a supposed binary opposition of refusal vs. acceptance in the receipt slot.
This study investigates high vowel laxing in the Louisiana French of the Lafourche Basin. Unlike Canadian French, in which the high vowels /i, y, u/ are traditionally described as undergoing laxing (to [I, Y, U]) in word-final syllables closed by any consonant other than a voiced fricative (see Poliquin 2006), Oukada (1977) states that in the Louisiana French of Lafourche Parish, any coda consonant will trigger high vowel laxing of /i/; he excludes both /y/ and /u/ from his discussion of high vowel laxing. The current study analyzes tokens of /i, y, u/ from pre-recorded interviews with three older male speakers from Terrebonne Parish. We measured the first and second formants and duration for high vowel tokens produced in four phonetic environments, crossing syllable type (open vs. closed) by consonant type (voiced fricative vs. any consonant other than a voiced fricative). Results of the acoustic analysis show optional laxing for /i/ and /y/ and corroborate the finding that high vowels undergo laxing in word-final closed syllables, regardless of consonant type. Data for /u/ show that the results vary widely by speaker, with the dominant pattern (shown by two out of three speakers) that of lowering and backing in the vowel space of closed syllable tokens. Duration data prove inconclusive, likely due to the effects of stress. The formant data published here constitute the first acoustic description of high vowels for any variety of Louisiana French and lay the groundwork for future study on these endangered varieties.
The Perceptual Effect of L1 Prosody Transplantation on L2 Speech: The Case of French Accented German
(2016)
Research has shown that language learners are not only challenged by segmental differences between their native language (L1) and the second language (L2). They also have problems with the correct production of suprasegmental structures, like phone/syllable duration and the realization of pitch. These difficulties often lead to a perceptible foreign accent. This study investigates the influence of prosody transplantation on foreign accent ratings. Syllable duration and pitch contour were transferred from utterances of a male and female German native speaker to utterances of ten French native speakers speaking German. Acoustic measurements show that French learners spoke with a significantly lower speaking rate. As expected, results of a perception experiment judging the accentedness of 1) German native utterances, 2) unmanipulated and 3) manipulated utterances of French learners of German suggest that the transplantation of the prosodic features syllable duration and pitch leads to a decrease in accentedness rating. These findings confirm results found in similar studies investigating prosody transplantation with different L1 and L2 and provide a beneficial technique for (computer-assisted) pronunciation training.
The IFCASL corpus is a French-German bilingual phonetic learner corpus designed, recorded and annotated in a project on individualized feedback in computer-assisted spoken language learning. The motivation for setting up this corpus was that there is no phonetically annotated and segmented corpus for this language pair of comparable of size and coverage. In contrast to most learner corpora, the IFCASL corpus incorporate data for a language pair in both directions, i.e. in our case French learners of German, and German learners of French. In addition, the corpus is complemented by two sub-corpora of native speech by the same speakers. The corpus provides spoken data by about 100 speakers with comparable productions, annotated and segmented on the word and the phone level, with more than 50% manually corrected data. The paper reports on inter-annotator agreement and the optimization of the acoustic models for forced speech-text alignment in exercises for computer-assisted pronunciation training. Example studies based on the corpus data with a phonetic focus include topics such as the realization of /h/ and glottal stop, final devoicing of obstruents, vowel quantity and quality, pitch range, and tempo.
Evaluation of Phonatory Behavior of German and French Speakers in Native and Non-native Speech
(2016)
Phonatory behavior of German speakers (GS) and French speakers (FS) in native (L1) and non-native (L2) speech was instrumentally examined. Vowel productions of the two groups were analyzed using a parametrization of phonatory behaviour and phonatory quality properties in the acoustic signal. The behavior of GS is characterized by more strained adduction of the vocal folds whereas FS show more incomplete glottal closure. Furthermore, GS change their phonatory behavior in the foreign language (=French) by adapting phonatory strategies of FS, whereas FS do not show this tendency. In addition, German beginners (BEG) and partly German advanced learners (ADV) are already orientated on production characteristics of the L2. French BEG however retain their phonatory behavior in L2 (=German) by showing less vocal fold adduction in comparison to their L1. French ADV show the opposite behavior. Finally, ADV of the two speaker groups generally show more strained behavior in L2 productions than BEG. The results provide evidence that GS and FS apply different laryngeal phonatory settings and that they altered their settings in L2 differently. Perceptual evaluation of voice quality of the speech material and a correlation analysis between acoustic and perceptual results are suggested for future research.
Vorgestellt werden kontrastive Analysen zur Besetzung und Häufigkeitsverteilung von Vorfeldern im Deutschen und ihren französischen, italienischen, norwegischen, polnischen und ungarischen Äquivalenten in morphosyntaktisch annotierten Wikipedia-Korpora. Im Rahmen der Untersuchung wurden mit korpusanalytischen Methoden quantitative Zusammenhänge bei den sprachspezifischen Ausprägungen von Vorfeldern nachgewiesen, die im Einklang mit typischen Struktureigenschaften der untersuchten Kontrastsprachen stehen. Die Ergebnisse legen aber nahe, dass die untersuchten Vorfeldstrukturen ‒ trotz der beträchtlichen Größe und thematischen Vielfalt der Wikipedia-Korpora ‒ nicht hinreichend repräsentativ sind, um uneingeschränkt Rückschlüsse auf allgemeine Struktureigenschaften der sechs Kontrastsprachen zu ziehen. Hierfür verantwortlich ist insbesondere die ausgeprägte Textsortenspezifizität der Mediengattung (Online-)Enzyklopädie, was mithilfe weiterer Vergleichskorpora aufgezeigt werden konnte.
Der Sammelband zur typologisch und kontrastiv vergleichenden grammatischen Erforschung und Beschreibung des Satzanfangs des Deutschen und vier seiner Kontrastsprachen ist ein Ergebnis eines Forschungsnetzwerks, bestehend aus dem Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim) und Forschergruppen verschiedener europäischer Universitäten. Unter Berücksichtigung insbesondere morphosyntaktischer und informationsstruktureller Aspekte werden die satztopologischen Unterschiede der typologisch recht heterogenen Sprachen bzw. Sprachfamilien unter verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten beleuchtet. Die Untersuchungen werden korpusbasiert durchgeführt, wobei sich die Hälfte der Beiträge auf aufbereitete POS-getaggte Wikipedia-Korpora stützt. Die quantitativ ausgerichteten Korpusanalysen ermöglichen einen genauen Einblick in die unterschiedlichen Strukturmerkmale der betreffenden Sprachen sowie in sprachübergreifende Textmerkmale, und die qualitativen Untersuchungen zeigen Ähnlichkeiten und Abweichungen bei bestimmten Verfahren, die sich morphosyntaktisch iederschlagen und besonders am Satzanfang relevant sind. Insgesamt erlauben die Beiträge Hypothesen zu topologisch und informationsstrukturell markierten Satzanfängen und zu Präferenzen in den jeweiligen Sprachen, aber auch zu möglichen Konstanten und Gemeinsamkeiten, was – auf differenziertere Korpora erweitert – für die Bereiche Sprache und Kognition sowie computergestützte Übersetzung ein großer Gewinn sein dürfte.