This thesis presents the results of two studies that investigated how listeners adapt to different regional accents within the same language. Study 1 investigated whether listeners adjusted their vowel categorization decisions when listening to speech produced in different accents of British English. The results demonstrated that some listeners chose different vowels according to the accent of the carrier sentence. The patterns of adjustment were affected by individual differences in language background (i.e., the degree of experience that an individual has had living in multidialectal environments, and whether the individual grew up in the north or south of England), and corresponded to changes in production that speakers make as a result of sociolinguistic factors when living in a multidialectal environment. Study 2 investigated plasticity in speech production and perception among university students, as individuals change their accent from regional to "educated" norms. Subjects were tested before beginning university, 3 months later and on completion of their first year of study. At each stage they were recorded reading a set of test words and a short passage. They also completed two perceptual tasks they found best exemplar locations for vowels embedded in carrier sentences and identified words in noise. The results demonstrated that subjects changed their spoken accent after attending university. The changes were linked to sociolinguistic factors subjects who were highly motivated to fit in with their university community changed their accent more. There was some evidence for a link between production and perception between-subject differences in production and perception were correlated. However, this relationship was weaker for within-subject changes in accent over time.

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« I think that philosophy is still rude and elementary. It will one day be taught by poets.The poet is in the natural attitude; he is believing; the philosopher, after some struggle, havingonly reasons for believing. » Le propos de cette thèse consistera à étudier dans quelle mesurele poète pourrait, un jour, enseigner la philosophie. Pour mener à bien ce travail de recherche,il conviendra d’étudier les paradoxes de la poétique révélés par une lecture génétique del’oeuvre d’Emerson.Alors que Platon chassait le poète en dehors de la cité, Emerson souhaite lui redonnerune place de choix dans la société. Par la lecture du projet poétique formulé par Emerson,l’étude de ses poèmes dans un cadre de « longue durée » et l’analyse d’une poétique quis’éprouve dans la prose pour progressivement perdre la subjectivité dans l’impersonnel, ils’agira de mettre en lumière dans quelle mesure l’expressivité poétique peut être productriced’un discours philosophique. Il conviendra alors de revenir sur l’idée de transcendance, et del’ouvrir au dialogue avec celle d’immanence pour mettre en lumière les liens entre poésie etphilosophie. Dès lors, il faudra s’interroger sur le discours produit par l’écriture d’Emerson etse demander s’il y a création de concepts, et donc philosophie, telle que Deleuze la définit. Lapoétique d’Emerson pourra apparaître comme la propulsion d’une pensée philosophique,suspendue dans l’indicible. Dans ce travail derecherche, il sera question de comprendre comment la poétique participe du projetmétaphysique de reformulation de l’âme pour suggérer un discours de portée philosophiqueencore inapprochable. Cette dernière idée ouvrira la perspective de la création, si elle existe, duconcept de « poète-penseur » dont Nietzsche prendra la pleine mesure à la suite d’Emerson. / Does Ralph Waldo Emerson make a better essayist than a poet? For a majority of his readers, it seems to be so: Emerson’s poetic talents would be best expressed in prose. In any case, he would not personify the poet he describes in his famous essay “The Poet,” and we should turn to Whitman and Dickinson for avant-garde poetry. It is such an assertion that I wish to challenge in this study. To do so, I offer an architectonic exploration of Emerson’s poetics to surpass the simplistic oppositions between his poems and essays, and to show how the ones as well as the others come under poetics that outstrip their constructive paradoxes. This research is thus organized around three major paradoxes, whose solution depends on three offices Emerson all holds at once. The office of the archeologist allows to resolve the paradox of the tabula rasa: how are we to understand that Emerson repeatedly rejects the influence of the past while his work remains saturated with literary and philosophical references? The office of the architect allows to untangle the paradox of the poet: how are we to interpret the conflicting relationship between Emerson and the poetic persona, given that his poems do not seem to take account of the poetic principles that the great poet to come is obliged to respect? The office of the anarchist finally allows to shed light on the paradox of the subject: how are we to account for an absolutely free subject – the projected goal of Emerson’s poetic project – that would not be limited by the restring confines of textuality itself?