A une époque où l’informatique a envahi tous les aspects de notre vie quotidienne, il est tout à fait normal de voir le domaine informatique participer aux travaux en sciences humaines et sociales, et notamment en linguistique où le besoin de développer des logiciels informatiques se fait de plus en plus pressant avec le volume grandissant des corpus traités. D’où notre travail de thèse qui consiste en l’élaboration d’un programme EPL qui étudie le parler arabe libanais blanc. En partant d’un corpus élaboré à partir de deux émissions télévisées enregistrées puis transcrites en lettres arabes, ce programme, élaboré avec le logiciel Access, nous a permis d’extraire les mots et les collocations et de procéder à une analyse linguistique aux niveaux lexical, phonétique, syntaxique et collocationnel. Le fonctionnement de l’EPL ainsi que le code de son développement sont décrits en détails dans une partie informatique à part. Des annexes de taille closent la thèse et rassemblent le produit des travaux de toute une équipe de chercheures venant de maintes spécialités. / At a time when computer science has invaded all aspects of our daily life, it is natural to see the computer field participating in human and social sciences work, and more particularly in linguistics where the need to develop computer software is becoming more and more pressing with the growing volume of analyzed corpora. Hence our thesis which consists in elaborating a program EPL that studies the white Lebanese Arabic speech. Starting from a corpus elaborated from two TV programs recorded then transcribed in Arabic letters, the program EPL, developed with Access software, allowed us to extract words and collocations, and to carry out a linguistic analysis on the lexical, phonetic, syntactic and collocational levels. The EPL’s functioning as well as its development code are described in the computer part. Important annexes conclude the thesis and gather the result of the work of a team of researchers coming from different specialties.

Objectif : Les femmes avec œdème de Reinke (FR) sont souvent prises pour des hommes au téléphone. Ainsi, leurs voix masculines sont intéressantes pour l’étude des stéréotypes de genre dans la voix. L’objectif de cette étude est de vérifier leur plainte dans un cadre expérimental et de rechercher les paramètres acoustiques utilisés dans l’identification du genre en se basant sur leurs voix.Matériel et Méthode : Une étude d’auto-évaluation met en évidence la perception qu’ont les FR de leurs voix. Une étude de production compare les paramètres acoustiques de voyelles et de phrases produites par 10 FR avec ceux des productions de 10 femmes et de 10 hommes aux voix normales (FN et HN). Un jury naïf évalue le genre vocal des FR, FN et HN. Résultats : Les FR s’auto-évaluent comme ayant une voix masculine et une personnalité féminine. Les paramètres acoustiques qui permettent de distinguer les voix des FR sont liés à la fréquence fondamentale, à la pente spectrale, au ratio des harmoniques par rapport au bruit et à la complexité de l’enveloppe spectrale. Le jury naïf, surtout les femmes, jugent les voix des FR comme « sûrement masculines » plus souvent qu’elles ne jugent les voix des FN quelle que soit la production vocale. Conclusions : Les auditeurs et surtout les auditrices évaluent les FR comme ayant une voix « sûrement masculine » par rapport aux FN. Ce classement est corrélé à la F0 ainsi qu’à des paramètres acoustiques liés à la qualité vocale : CPP, H1H2, HNR05, HNR15 et HNR25. Ces nouvelles informations contribuent à la compréhension de la perception du genre dans la voix et pourraient guider la réhabilitation des personnes se plaignant d’ambiguïté du genre vocal. / Purpose: Women with Reinke’s edema (RW) are often identified as men over the phone. For this reason, their masculine sounding voice is interesting for the study of gender stereotypes. The study’s objective is to verify their complaint and to understand the cues used in gender identification based on their voices.Methods: We verified, through a self-evaluation study, the perception of their own voice by RW. We compared the acoustic parameters of vowels and sentences produced by 10 RW to those produced by 10 men (NM) and 10 women (NW) with normal voices in Lebanese Arabic. We conducted two perception studies for the evaluation of RW, NM and NW voices by naïve listeners. Results: RW self-evaluated their voice as being masculine and their personality as being feminine. The acoustic parameters distinguishing RW voices concern pitch, spectral slope, harmonicity of the voicing signal and complexity of the spectral envelop. Naïve listeners (especially women) rate RW voices as “surely masculine” more often than they rate NW voices even in sentences. Conclusions: Listeners (especially women) rate RW’s gender as “surely masculine” more often than NW. These incorrect gender ratings are correlated with acoustic measures of voice quality. The most contributing parameters to gender perception are: F0, CPP, H1H2, HNR05, HNR15, and HNR25. This new data contributes to the understanding of the perception of gender in voice and will guide the rehabilitation plan of patients complaining of an ambiguous voice.

In the Arabic-speaking world, sociopolitical upheaval, extended conflict and population displacement have triggered extensive contact between mutually intelligible varieties of the language. Notwithstanding these developments, Arabic sociolinguistic research on dialect contact settings remains limited to certain well-documented areas (e.g., Al-Wer 2020), with markedly less research targeting other locales believed to be highly propitious to convergent change, such as the long-term contact situation in Lebanon involving Lebanese and Palestinian Arabic (Fityan 1981; Hennessey 2011). Furthermore, few studies are embedded in a (comparative) variationist sociolinguistic framework (Owens 2013), and even fewer studies are articulated from a socio-historical perspective incorporating diachronic data sources with which to better understand the process of language change in Arabic (Owens 2013). Much previous research on Arabic dialects is also based on investigations of phonological variation (Al-Wer and de Jong 2018), with correspondingly less attention paid to (morpho-)syntactic variation (Choueiri 2019). The present study aims to address existing lacunae in the research literature by investigating the outcomes of dialect contact in Beirut between Palestinian Arabic (PA), the minority variety, and Lebanese Arabic (LA), the majority variety. Drawing on the framework of comparative variationist sociolinguistics (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001) as well as research on dialect contact (Britain and Trudgill 2005), this study combines synchronic and diachronic data sources to compare three variables in LA and PA: a phonological variable, involving the word-medial raising of /a:/ to [e:] (e.g., [ka:n] alternating with [ke:n] 'he/it was'); and two morpho-syntactic variables: verbal negation and future temporal reference. The overarching aim of the research is to examine the extent to which PA shows evidence, as gauged from linguistic constraints on variant selection and variant repertoires, of becoming more structurally similar to LA in different linguistic components (Cheshire, Kerswill, and Williams 2005). The synchronic data come from 45 hours of spontaneous speech recorded in Beirut from 39 Palestinian and 27 Lebanese speakers stratified by age, sex, and level of education, generating 7,671 tokens representing the three targeted variables. A further 15,381 tokens of these three variables come from two diachronic datasets. The first is a sub-set of speech recordings from the Palestinian Oral History Archive, an online compendium of interviews with first-generation (older) Palestinians in Lebanon, recorded between the 1990s and early 2000s. The second diachronic dataset is the Lebanese Popular Theatre Corpus (LPTC), based on 34 televised plays dating from the 1960s and performed in colloquial LA. Results reveal that the [e:] variant, a stereotypical feature of LA, but not emblematic of PA spoken in Beirut (Hennessey 2011), is virtually absent from the speech of the older Palestinian generation in the synchronic and diachronic datasets, but it increases significantly in the speech of young (third-generation) Palestinian speakers, who replicate the linguistic conditioning of variant selection in LA. These results bolster the inference of contact-induced change in PA due to the influence of LA. With respect to verbal negation, the findings show that there is convergent change in terms of overall variant rates in this variable system in PA. Evidence suggests that this variable system is undergoing dialect levelling as a result of contact, with socially marked minority variants diminishing over time in the speech of educated Palestinians. The future temporal reference system, however, seems to be less amenable to contact-induced change, despite similarities in surface forms between LA and PA. Results indicate that this variable system is undergoing an internal change in PA independent of contact with LA, which is led by young, educated speakers, in line with what has been observed in PA spoken outside Lebanon (AbuAmsha 2016). Viewed in the aggregate, the results show that even though it is claimed that (morpho-) syntactic variables may be less susceptible to convergent change than phonological variables (Cheshire et al. 2005; Hinskens et al. 2005), we do not find a neat division between phonology and morpho-syntax. Word-medial imala is overtly commented on and explicitly identified by the targeted Palestinian speech community as a marker of Lebanese speech. Its iconic association with Lebanese speech patterns renders it particularly susceptible to long-term dialect accommodation for some Palestinians. Verbal negation is also subject to social evaluation, as gauged from explicit speaker meta-commentary, and socially marked exponents appear vulnerable to attrition over time. By contrast, the expression of the future temporal reference appears less socially indexical than the other variables and is not subject to normative commentary or overt correction. These differences implicate the social salience of the targeted variables as a key factor influencing their susceptibility to convergence. Situating the results in a wider perspective, the findings highlight the utility of the comparative variationist framework in elucidating the process of language change in spoken Arabic, especially in PA as spoken in Beirut, as well as in distinguishing contact-induced change from internally-motivated change. The results of this study indicate that the effects of dialect contact, and critically, the existence of contact-induced change cannot be fully understood without using a multi-faceted comparative approach incorporating horizontal and vertical comparisons. The results converge in demonstrating that an empirically accountable quantitative approach based on actual speech data is capable of transcending the limitations of alternative frameworks of analysis that have been used to investigate change in dialect contact scenarios in the Arabic-speaking world.

Ce travail de thèse vise à étudier le lien entre les représentations phonologiques et l’acquisition des dispositifs morphosyntaxiques chez les enfants libanais avec et sans trouble développemental du langage (TDL). Nous y avons examiné la relation entre le développement morphosyntaxique d’une part et les habiletés méta-langagières et mnésiques d’autre part afin d’explorer un rôle prédictif probable de ces dernières au niveau du développement morphosyntaxique dans ses versants réceptif et expressif.Une série d’épreuves expérimentales ont été menées auprès d’enfants arabophones libanais avec et sans TDL. Plusieurs appariements ont été entrepris par niveau lexical réceptif ou morphosyntaxique réceptif ainsi que par âge réel. Différentes épreuves langagières ont été utilisées telles que la compréhension et la production des marques de genre et de nombre, la dénomination ainsi que des épreuves méta-langagières et cognitives, telles que la décision lexicale, la conscience morphologique flexionnelle, le jugement de grammaticalité et la mémoire verbale de travail. Nos résultats ont mis en évidence une différence significative du niveau de la spécification des représentations phonologiques chez les enfants avec TDL comparés à leurs pairs, appariés par niveau lexical réceptif. De même, les enfants avec TDL diffèrent significativement des enfants ayant un développement typique et appariés par âge réel au niveau des compétences langagières et non langagières. Il est, en outre, ressorti de cette étude une différence entre le niveau de la compréhension et de l’expression en morphosyntaxe chez les enfants TDL. Les préfixes verbaux /j/ et /t/ marquant le genre au présent en arabe libanais ont été identifiés comme indicateur clinique du TDL. Une corrélation significative est d’ailleurs présente entre les capacités langagières et les habiletés méta- langagières, notamment au niveau de la conscience morphologique et du jugement grammatical chez les enfants avec TDL. Une faible corrélation a par contre été relevée entre les capacités langagières et la mémoire de travail chez le même groupe. / This dissertation is the first study that examines the relationship between the phonological representations and the acquisition of morphosyntactic mechanisms in Lebanese Arabic-speaking children with and without developmental language disorders. Moreover, it explores the possibility of finding a predictive role for the metalinguistic abilities and memory skills at the morphosyntactic development level, in its receptive and expressive aspects.A battery of experimental tasks was conducted and several matchings were undertaken based on the lexical receptive skills or morphosyntactic level as well as chronological age. Different linguistic tests were used such as the comprehension and the production of gender and number as well as metalinguistic tests such as lexical decision, inflectional morphological awareness, grammatical judgment and verbal working memory. Findings reveal a significant difference between children with developmental language disorder and their peers matched by lexical receptive age at the level of specification of phonological representations. Similarly, children with language disorders differ significantly from typically developing children, matched on chronological age in terms of language and non-language skills. This study also shows a difference between the level of production and the level of comprehension in the morphosyntax among children with developmental language disorders. The verbal prefixes /j/ and /t/ marking the gender in the present tense in Arabic have been identified as a clinical indicator of language disorder. There is an evident correlation between the tests of the linguistic and metalinguistic capacities, particularly at the level of morphological awareness and grammatical judgment in children with language disorders. However, a weak correlation is found between language skills and verbal working memory in the same group. / تعتبر هذه الأطروحة رائدة في دراسة العلاقة بين ال ّتمثيلات الفونولوجية واكتساب القواعدلدى ال ّطفل اللّبناني في إطار تطور اللغة الطبيعي والإ ّضطراب اللّغوي ال ّنمائي. وتهدف أيضاً الى ت ق ي ي م م ه ا ر ا ت ا ل و ع ي ا ل ل ّ غ و ي و ا ل ّ ذ ا ك ر ة ل ت ح د ي د ا ل م ه ا ر ة ا ل ّ ت ي ت ل ع ب د و ر ا ل م ؤ ّش ر ف ي ا ك ت س ا ب ق و ا ع د ا ل ل ّ غ ة .ت ّم إجراء ع ّدة إختبارات ضمن دراسات مقارنة بين المجموعتين، الأطفال مع تطور طبيعي وأولئك الّذين يظهرون ا ّضطراباً لغوياً نمائياًّ، على أساس تطابق في مستوى فهم المفردات، فهم القواعد أو في العمر الزمني. وقد تض ّمنت ال ّدراسة إختبارات لغو ّية لقياس الفهم وال ّتعبير في مجال مورفولوجيا ال ّنوع والعدد بالموازاة مع اختبارات الوعي المورفولوجي ال ّنحوي، الوعي التركيبي وال ّذاكرة العمل ّية. وقد أظهرت نتائج ال ّدراسة وجود تباين واضح في مستوى تمايز ال ّتمثيلات الفونولوجية عندمقارنة المجموعتين المتطابقتين في مستوى فهم المفردات. كما تب ّين أ ّن مستوى الفهم القواعدي يتق ّدم على مستوى ال ّتعبير لدى الأطفال مع اضطراب اللّغة ال ّنمائي. وكذلك أثبت ال ّدراسة ترابطاً متيناً بين القدرات القواعد ّية ومستوى مهارات الوعي اللّغوي لدى أطفال المجموعتين في حين أ ّن العلاقة بين القدرات القواعد ّية وال ّذاكرة العمل ّية بدت ضعيفة. كما ش ّكل استعمال المورفيم الخاص باتباع الفعلبالفاعل من حيث ال ّنوع مؤ ّشراً عياد ّياً بارزاً في هذا الإ ّضطراب اللّغوي. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished