L’intelligibilité de la parole est un véritable enjeu dans la prise en charge des personnes présentant un trouble de la production de la parole pathologique (TPPP). L’usage de ce terme, avec un sens commun recouvrant le domaine de la compréhension, et un sens restreint répondant à la mesure du transfert d’information linguistique dans un contexte de test, entretient une ambigüité ; ambigüité qui entrave le développement des concepts de prise en charge. L’objectif de ce travail de thèse est, à travers trois groupes d’expériences autour de la notion d’intelligibilité, de proposer un cadre conceptuel pouvant servir à organiser la prise en charge des TPPP et à identifier les questions de recherche fondamentale impliquées dans la problématique de l’intelligibilité dans les TPPP.L’objectif principal du premier groupe d’expériences est d’étudier la place de l’intelligibilité dans les stratégies cognitives sous-jacentes à la perception de la parole pathologique. La méthode utilisée est une catégorisation libre..La deuxième série d’expériences est consacrée à la manière dont un groupe d’experts réalise une tâche de jugement de sévérité comparée à une tâche de jugement d’intelligibilité. Le troisième groupe d’expériences cherche à déterminer les cibles les plus efficaces dans la prise en charge des TPPP. Elle repose sur l’hypothèse suivante : la conservation d’une perception juste d’un phonème ou d’une syllabe malgré sa distorsion pathologique permet de déterminer sa contribution à l’intelligibilité et participe à la définition de la notion de robustesse perceptive. Pour tester cette hypothèse, une méthode d’analyse du taux de perception obtenu par un jury d’auditeurs, en fonction du degré de vraisemblance issu d’un système automatique de reconnaissance a été formalisée. Les résultats de ces expériences, interprétées sous l’éclairage croisé des théories sur la perception et de la production de la parole et des modèles de santé, nous ont permis de proposer une définition des différents concepts dans la perspective de la classification internationale du fonctionnement. / The intelligibility of speech is a real challenge for the management of speech disorders. The use of this word, with a common meaning of comprehension and, a specific meaning in a context of test, of measurement of the information transfer, carries some ambiguity, which could hinder the concept of management.The purpose of this work is to propose a conceptual framework for the management of pathological speech production (PSP) through three kinds of experiments. The aim of the first set of experiments is to study the place of the intelligibility within the underlying cognitive strategies of the perception of pathological speech.A free classification method is used with a corpus of sentences read by 33 speakers: 20 patients with speech disorders (a pathological speech production due to neurological diseases or sequellae of cancer or malformative lesions) and 13 normal subjects. The second set of experiments studies the way an expert group performs evaluation of severity compared to evaluation of intelligibility. During an off line experiment, the corpus of the previous study filled by a corpus of different sentences by speaker, was presented to 5 judges (logopedists and phoniatriciansThe third group of experiments looks for the most efficient targets for managing speech disorders. It‘s based on the following assumption: the preservation of a correct perception of a phoneme or a syllable, despite its pathological distortion, allows to determine its contribution to intelligibility and participates to the notion of perceptive robustness. For testing this assumption, was proposed a method of analysis by the identification score (obtained by a jury of listeners) function of the degree of” plausibility (obtained by an automatic system for speech recognition). The outcome of these experiments, adopting the points of view of some perception theories of SD mixed with health models allow us to precise the definition of the main concepts in the prospect of the international classification of functioning.

This study investigates Swedish upper-secondary teachers’ views and reported practices regarding pronunciation instruction in the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom. It adopts a mixed-method design, analysing qualitative data collected from a focus-group interview (N=4) and quantitative data collected from an online survey (N=54).  To investigate the views and reported practices of teachers, the following research questions were posed:  1. What are the views and attitudes of English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school regarding pronunciation and pronunciation instruction?  2. How do English teachers in the Swedish upper-secondary school describe their own practices in pronunciation instruction?  Results indicate that teachers generally value comprehensibility as the most important aim of pronunciation instruction. However, a native-like accent still seems to be highly valued, and nativeness norms still seem to affect teachers’ views and practices to some extent. Finally, our findings indicate that teachers spend very little time on pronunciation teaching in general, and they highlight that other aspects of language instruction are more important.

The purpose of this work is to measure the degree of intelligibility of native and non-native English speech as well as analyse the major sources of intelligibility failure when speakers of these varieties of English interact. British and American English (henceforth BrE and AmE) and Cameroon English (hereafter CamE) are used as a case study with focus on segmental and supra segmental features. The study was motivated by a number of concerns, several of which are more prominent: First, it was motivated by the trepidation scholars like Gimson (1965, 1980); Prator (1968); etc. nursed that the unprecedented spread of English across the globe and the emergence of non-native varieties would cause English to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible languages, in the way Romance languages devolved from their Latin ancestor. The second motivation was that previous researchers (Bansal 1969, Tiffen 1974) on intelligibility have often concentrated their efforts on the traditional approach, which sees intelligibility from a one-sided perspective. To them, the non-native varieties of English are deficient and not different varieties from the native varieties. They were seen as substandard, incorrect, and unintelligible and thus needed remediation at all costs. The native varieties were seen as prestigious, correct, intelligible and the sole norm that must be emulated by non-native English speakers. In this way any interaction between a native speaker and a non-native speaker should be characterised by the non-native speaker making all the efforts to be understood as well as to understand the native English-speaking partner. This explains in large part why these researchers concentrated on measuring the intelligibility of non-native speech to native speakers and never vice versa. It was as if it was treasonable to measure the intelligibility of native speech to non-native speakers. Even if some researchers managed to do this, the comments that followed such data still showed that the aim was not to test the intelligibility of native speakers but to find out how efficient the non-native speakers were in understanding the native speaker. Another aim could also be to reinforce the teaching of the native norm, which was seen as “correct” against non-native features, which were seen as “incorrect”, to measuring intelligibility. While accepting that these studies reflected the conventional wisdom of the time, this study aims to move the debate forward by looking at intelligibility from a two-sided perspective. It sees communication between speakers of different varieties as a game of give and take, where both participants “tune in” to make the process successful rather than one participant being obliged to make all the efforts because s/he speaks a new English variety. That explains why we are testing not only the intelligibility of non-native speakers to native speakers but also native speakers to non-native speakers. / Gegenstand der vorgelegten Promotionsarbeit ist die Untersuchung der gegenseitigen Verständlichkeit von muttersprachlichem und nicht-muttersprachlichem Englisch. Im besonderen werden die Hauptquellen und Ursachen des Scheiterns von Verständlichkeit in einer empirischen Studie bestimmt, klassifiziert und analysiert. Die Untersuchung wird exemplarisch anhand des Kamerunischen Englisch einerseits und des Britischen und Amerikanischen Englisch anderseits vorgenommen. Motiviert ist diese Arbeit vor allem durch folgende Punkte. Erstens bedarf es der Auseinandersetzung mit den durch eine Reihe von Autoren geäußerten Befürchtungen (z.B. Gimson 1965, 1980 und Prator 1968), daß die Herausbildung und Entwicklung neuer Varianten des Englischen letztlich zu einer Auflösung des Englischen in gegenseitig nicht mehr verständliche Sprachen führt, ein Prozeß, wie er sich historisch bei der Entstehung der romanischen Sprachen aus dem Lateinischen vollzog. Derartige Befürchtungen werden genährt durch die bisher ohnegleichen fortschreitende Verbreitung des Englischen über den gesamten Globus. Hier ergibt sich die dringende Notwendigkeit vergleichender Studien zur gegenseitigen Verständlichkeit zwischen den bestehenden Varianten. Zweitens folgen die meisten zu diesem Thema vorliegenden Untersuchungen im wesentlichen einer traditionellen, überkommenen Grundperspektive: die nicht-muttersprachlichen Varianten des Englischen werden als „abweichend“ bzw. sogar „defizitär“ aus Sicht der muttersprachlichen betrachtet, nicht aber als eigenständige Sprachformen (z.B. Bansal 1969; Tiffen 1974). Dies führt nach Auffassung des Autors zu einer einseitigen Betrachtung und Bewertung. Im besonderen wird in der sprachlichen Interaktion bei einem solchen Zugang die Last zu verstehen und für den Kommunikationspartner verständlich zu sein einseitig dem nicht-muttersprachlichen Sprecher übertragen. Auf diesem Hintergrund untersuchen die vorliegenden Studien anderer Autoren primär die Verständlichkeit nicht-muttersprachlicher Sprachformen für den muttersprachlichen Sprecher, nicht jedoch die umgekehrte Konstellation. Wenn die umgekehrte Perspektive überhaupt berücksichtigt wird, so zeigen die Kommentare, daß nicht die Verständlichkeit muttersprachlicher Sprecher für den Nichtmuttersprachler eigentliches Ziel und Gegenstand der Untersuchung war, sondern vielmehr die Frage, wie effizient sich Nichtmuttersprachler beim Verstehen muttersprachlicher Äußerungen zeigten. Des weiteren stehen diese Studien oft im Kontext des Bestrebens, im institutionalisierten Spracherwerb die muttersprachlichen Normen gegen die nicht-muttersprachlichen Merkmale durchzusetzen, die als „nicht korrekt“ angesehen werden. Diese Positionen, der zugrundeliegende Zugang und die einseitige Ausrichtung bedürfen einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung.

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Creating the optimal balance between dialogue level and ambient sound is extremely important in media productions. This process is however inherently difficult due to that people’s requirements and preferences are not uniform. Speech intelligibility is affected by a multitude of factors, such as hearing impairments, audio quality and listening equipment. Recent EU directives on accessibility calls for improved audio clarity features for broadcast content. To accommodate these requirements, the broadcast industry needs to develop functionality for enhanced dialogue clarity and, optimally, put listeners in control of these features. Many speech enhancement techniques exist, this paper uses Sveriges Radio as a case study to evaluate several of these methods. A study on enhancing speech intelligibility through the use of dynamic range control and blind source separation is presented and results show that both methods can have a positive impact. Dynamic range control proves efficient in increasing intelligibility by reducing dynamic variations. It is also well suited to implement in an existing two-channel infrastructure, common in the radio industry, due to being included in novel audio codecs. Blind source separation is found to best be used in moderation due to the risk of audio quality degradation, and is primarily suited for prerecorded material on account of the processing time needed. / Att skapa en optimal balans mellan dialognivå och bakgrundsljud är oerhört viktigt i medieproduktioner. Detta är dock i sig komplicerat på grund av människors olika förutsättningar och preferenser. Taluppfattbarheten påverkas av en mängd faktorer, såsom hörselnedsättningar, ljudkvalitet och lyssningsutrustning. Nya EU-direktiv om tillgänglighet ställer krav på förbättrade funktioner för ljudtydlighet i etermedia. För att tillgodose dessa krav behöver branschen utveckla funktionalitet för ökad dialogtydlighet och företrädesvis också stöd för att lyssnarna själva ska kunna styra dessa funktioner. Det finns många tekniker för att öka taluppfattbarheten, denna artikel använder Sveriges Radio som fallstudie för att utvärdera flera av dessa metoder. En studie om möjligheten till förbättrad taluppfattbarhet genom kontroll av ljudets dynamik (dynamic range control) och blindkallseparation (blind source separation) presenteras, och resultaten visar att båda metoderna kan ha en positiv inverkan. Dynamisk kontroll visar sig vara effektiv för att öka taluppfattbarheten genom att jämna ut dynamiskt innehåll. Tekniken lämpar sig också bra för implementering i en befintlig tvåkanals-infrastruktur, vilket är vanligt inom radioindustrin, på grund av att den inkluderas i nya ljud-kodekar. Blindkallseparation används bäst med måtta på grund av risk for ljudkvalitetsförsämring och är i första hand lämpad för förinspelat material på grund av den processeringstid som behövs.

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Linguistic fossilization is a prevalent phenomenon in adult ESLA and presents a perpetual pedagogical challenge to teachers. Despite controversy about the theoretical concept, research is increasingly showing that persistent erroneousness cannot be attributed to single causal factors. This single case study examines controversial aspects surrounding the concept and formulates criteria for identifying fossilization. The study investigates the conversational output of an independent adult learner over a period of nine months and presents a holistic exploration of causal influences. The findings substantiate that fossilization arises from changing combinations of factors, and that such combinations are unique to the situation of each adult learner. The key to the successful treatment of fossilized errors may lie in identifying their roots, which can be achieved by analyzing output and through discussion with learners in order to gain insight into their experience of the learning process. Results also suggest that a critical perspective on the theoretical construct is needed in order to investigate the phenomenon in adult second language acquisition. / Linguistics / M.A. (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL))