Browsing by Person "Pouplier, Marianne"

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A re-evaluation of the nature of speech errors in normal and disordered speakers.
(Karger, 2005) Pouplier, Marianne; Hardcastle, William J.
It is well known that speech errors in normal and aphasic speakers share certain key characteristics. Traditionally, many of these errors are regarded as serial misorderings of abstract phonological segments, which maintain the phonetic well-formedness of the utterance. The current paper brings together the results of several articulatory studies undertaken independently for both subject populations. These show that, in an error, instead of one segment substituting for another, two segments are often produced simultaneously even though only one segment may be heard. Such data pose problems for current models of speech production by suggesting that the commonly assumed dichotomous distinction between phonological and phonetic errors may not be tenable in the current form or may even be altogether redundant.
Conditioning factors in external sandhi : an EPG study of English /l/ vocalisation.
(2007-08) Scobbie, James M.; Pouplier, Marianne; Wrench, Alan A.; Acknowledgements. Research infrastructure development
English l-sandhi involves an allophonic alternation in alveolar contact for word-final /l/ in connected speech [4]. EPG data for five Scottish Standard English and five Southern Standard British English speakers shows that there is individual and dialectal variation in contact patterns. We analysed vocalisation rate (% of tokens with no alveolar contact) and the area of any residual alveolar contact. Word-final /l/ contact is, to some extent, onset-like before vowel-initial words and coda-like before words with a labial onset C. If the vowel has a glottal attack, however, or the onset C is /h/, sandhi is less predictable, suggesting that resyllabification is insufficient as a mechanism for conditioning tongue tip behaviour of word final /l/.
Investigating the asymmetry of English sibilant assimilation: Acoustic and EPG data
(Walter de Gruyter, 2011-05-01) Pouplier, Marianne; Hoole, Philip; Scobbie, James M.
We present tongue-palate contact (EPG) and acoustic data on English sibilant assimilation, with a particular focus on the asymmetry arising from the order of the sibilants. It is generally known that /s# / sequences may display varying degrees of regressive assimilation in fluent speech, yet for / #s/ it is widely assumed that no assimilation takes place, although the empirical content of this assumption has rarely been investigated nor a clear theoretical explanation proposed. We systematically compare the two sibilant orders in word-boundary clusters. Our data show that /s# / sequences assimilate frequently and this assimilation is strictly regressive. The assimilated sequence may be indistinguishable from a homorganic control sequence by our measures, or it can be characterized by measurement values intermediate to those typical for / / or /s/. / #s/ sequences may also show regressive assimilation, albeit less frequently and to a lesser degree. Assimilated / #s/ sequences are always distinguishable from /s#s/ sequences. In a few cases, we identify progressive assimilation for / #s/. We discuss how to account for the differences in degree of assimilation, and we propose that the order asymmetry may arise from the different articulatory control structures employed for the two sibilants in conjunction with phonotactic probability effects.
Recording speech articulation in dialogue: Evaluating a synchronized double Electromagnetic Articulography setup
(Elsevier, 2013-08-28) Geng, Christian C.; Turk, Alice; Scobbie, James M.; Macmartin, Cedric; Hoole, Philip; Richmond, Korin; Wrench, Alan A.; Pouplier, Marianne; Bard, Ellen Gurman; Campbell, Ziggy; Dickie, Catherine; Dubourg, Eddie; Hardcastle, William J.; Kainada, Evia; King, Simon; Lickley, Robin; Nakai, Satsuki; Renals, Steve; White, Kevin; Wiegand, Ronny; EPSRC
We demonstrate the workability of an experimental facility that is geared towards the acquisition of articulatory data from a variety of speech styles common in language use, by means of two synchronized electromagnetic articulography (EMA) devices. This approach synthesizes the advantages of real dialogue settings for speech research with a detailed description of the physiological reality of speech production. We describe the facility's method for acquiring synchronized audio streams of two speakers and the system that enables communication among control room technicians, experimenters and participants. Further, we demonstrate the feasibility of the approach by evaluating problems inherent to this specific setup: The first problem is the accuracy of temporal synchronization of the two EMA machines, the second is the severity of electromagnetic interference between the two machines. Our results suggest that the synchronization method used yields an accuracy of approximately 1 ms. Electromagnetic interference was derived from the complex-valued signal amplitudes. This dependent variable was analyzed as a function of the recording status - i.e. on/off - of the interfering machine's transmitters. The intermachine distance was varied between 1 m and 8.5 m. Results suggest that a distance of approximately 6.5 m is appropriate to achieve data quality comparable to that of single speaker recordings.
The role of syllable structure in external sandhi: An EPG study of vocalisation and retraction in word-final English /l/
(2010) Scobbie, James M.; Pouplier, Marianne
A pre-vocalic connected speech context is said to enable the resyllabification of word-final consonants into an onset, thus conditioning alternations. We present EPG data on English word-final /l/, measuring the extent of alveolar contact and the rate of vocalisation, the extent of dorsal retraction (representing darkness-), and the timing of alveolar contact relative to dorsal retraction. Two dialects of British English are considered, namely Scottish Standard English and Southern Standard British English. Results are that /l/ alternation is systematic: the tongue tip contact of word-final /l/, quite categorically for some speakers, is more onset-like in pre-vocalic and more coda-like in pre-consonantal contexts. This alternation is not along the lines predicted by a segmental resyllabification account, however. First, the segmental identity of the following consonant (/b/ or /h/) may be as powerful a factor in conditioning the presence or absence of alveolar contact for some speakers. Second, glottalisation of lexically vowel-initial words regularly occurs, but does not seem to condition the appearance (or otherwise) of tongue tip contact. Third, the tongue dorsum remains retracted and does not adopt an onset-like form or timing even when /l/ is pre-vocalic. Thus categorical resyllabification of a word-final /l/ segment based on phonotactic acceptability is rejected as a mechanism controlling English L-sandhi in connected speech. Instead, we propose a gestural-episodic model, in which individual gestures display different levels of coherence in lexical syllable roles, while in connected speech, segmental sequences are influenced by similarity to well-rehearsed lexical sequences, if they exist.