Pendant la perception de la parole, les locuteurs sont biaisés par un grand nombre de facteurs. Par exemple, il existe des limitations cognitives comme la mémoire ou l’attention, mais aussi des limitations linguistiques comme leur langue maternelle. Cette thèse se concentre sur deux de ces facteurs : les biais de traitement pendant la reconnaissance des mots, et les biais d’apprentissage pendant le processus de transmission. Ces facteurs peuvent se combiner et, au cours du temps, influencer l’évolution des langues. Dans la première partie de cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur le processus de la reconnaissance des mots. Des recherches antérieures ont établi l’importance des traits phonologiques (p. ex. le voisement ou le lieu d’articulation) pendant le traitement de la parole. Cependant, nous en savons peu sur leur poids relatif les uns par rapport aux autres, et comment cela peut influencer la capacité des locuteurs à reconnaître les mots. Nous avons testé des locuteurs français sur leur capacité à reconnaître des mots mal prononcés et avons trouvé que les traits de mode et de lieu sont plus importants que le trait de voisement. Nous avons ensuite considéré deux sources de cette asymétrie et avons trouvé que les locuteurs sont biaisés et par la perception acoustique ascendante (les contrastes de mode sont plus facile à percevoir à cause de leur distance acoustique importante) et par la connaissance lexicale descendante (le trait de lieu est plus exploité dans le lexique français que les autres traits). Nous suggérons que ces deux sources de biais se combinent pour influencer les locuteurs lors de la reconnaissance des mots. Dans la seconde partie de cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur la question d’un biais d’apprentissage. Il a été suggéré que les apprenants peuvent être biaisés vers l’apprentissage de certains patrons phonologiques grâce à leurs connaissances phonétiques. Cela peut alors expliquer pourquoi certains patrons sont récurrents dans la typologie, tandis que d’autres restent rares ou non-attestés. Plus spécifiquement, nous avons exploré le rôle d’un biais d’apprentissage sur l’acquisition de la règle typologiquement commune de l’harmonie vocalique comparée à celle de la règle non-attestée (mais logiquement équivalente) de la disharmonie vocalique. Nous avons trouvé des preuves d’un biais d’apprentissage aussi bien en perception qu’en production. En utilisant un modèle d’apprentissage itéré simulé, nous avons ensuite montré comment un biais, même petit, favorisant l’un des patrons, peut influencer la typologie linguistique au cours du temps et donc expliquer (en partie) la prépondérance de systèmes harmoniques. De plus, nous avons exploré le rôle du sommeil sur la consolidation mnésique. Nous avons montré que seul le patron commun bénéficie d’une consolidation et que cela est un facteur supplémentaire pouvant contribuer à l’asymétrie typologique. Dans l’ensemble, cette thèse considère certaines des sources de biais possibles chez l’individu et discute de comment ces influences peuvent, au cours du temps, faire évoluer les systèmes linguistiques. Nous avons démontré la nature dynamique et complexe du traitement de la parole, à la fois en perception et dans l’apprentissage. De futurs travaux devront explorer plus en détail comment ces différentes sources de biais sont pondérées les unes relativement aux autres. / During speech perception, listeners are biased by a great number of factors, including cognitive limitations such as memory and attention and linguistic limitations such as their native language. This thesis focuses on two of these factors: processing bias during word recognition, and learning bias during the transmission process. These factors are combinatorial and can, over time, affect the way languages evolve. In the first part of this thesis, we focus on the process of word recognition. Previous research has established the importance of phonological features (e.g., voicing or place of articulation) during speech processing, but little is known about their weight relative to one another, and how this influences listeners' ability to recognize words. We tested French participants on their ability to recognize mispronounced words and found that the manner and place features were more important than the voicing feature. We then explored two sources of this asymmetry and found that listeners were biased both by bottom-up acoustic perception (manner contrasts are easier to perceive because of their acoustic distance compared to the other features) and top-down lexical knowledge (the place feature is used more in the French lexicon than the other two features). We suggest that these two sources of bias coalesce during the word recognition process to influence listeners. In the second part of this thesis, we turn to the question of bias during the learning process. It has been suggested that language learners may be biased towards the learning of certain phonological patterns because of phonetic knowledge they have. This in turn can explain why certain patterns are recurrent in the typology while others remain rare or unattested. Specifically, we explored the role of learning bias on the acquisition of the typologically common rule of vowel harmony compared to the unattested (but logically equivalent) rule of vowel disharmony. We found that in both perception and production, there was evidence of a learning bias, and using a simulated iterated learning model, showed how even a small bias favoring one pattern over the other could influence the linguistic typology over time, thus explaining (in part) the prevalence of harmonic systems. We additionally explored the role of sleep on memory consolidation and showed evidence that the common pattern benefits from consolidation that the unattested pattern does not, a factor that may also contribute to the typological asymmetry. Overall, this thesis considers a few of the wide-ranging sources of bias in the individual and discusses how these influences can over time shape linguistic systems. We demonstrate the dynamic and complicated nature of speech processing (both in perception and learning) and open the door for future research to explore in finer detail just how these different sources of bias are weighted relative to one another.

The modal and spectral characteristic belongs among important human acoustic spaces of vocal tract. They occur at generating vowels and other acoustic aspects of human speech. We can observe the resonant phenomena of acoustic cavity of vocal tract in the human speech spectrum, primary however at vowels generation. However near vocal tract occurs series of frequency tops in the spectrum of vowels, which necessarily may not be resonant origin. That is why sometimes quite difficult assign is right frequency tops to resonant tops of acoustic cavity. It consist in operate of acoustic excitation of vocal tracts. The pronounced of vowels loudly and in a whisper has different excitation of vocal tract. At generating vowels loudly is excited by scheme of harmonic components outspread to fundamental frequency of glottis. At talking in a whisper is vocal tract excited by continuous spectrum generated by turbulent fluxion of exhaled flatus over glottis. We give a name "formant" to a frequency, at which happens to resonance of acoustic space. Aim of this work is analysis of Czech vowels formants generated loudly and in a whisper. Experimental metering of these formants was performed on human vocalic tract for all vowels. Further then on artificially created vocalic tracts for vowels A, I. Then were modal characteristics of vocal cavity for vowels A, I, tested by method of final elements with the help of computing program ANSYS. In this work were surveyed courses of acoustic pressures for individual formants, influence sizes vocal tract and influence of correct mouth opening on formants. Also has been effected computational simulation of harmonic excitation on tract by side of glottis.

This thesis focuses on the realization of high front vowel in Czech and Spanish, with respect to second language acquisition. In the first part, general theoretical concepts are explained, such as fossilization, SLA, critical period, and SLA model designed by Flege (1995) and also a comparison of the Spanish and Czech vowel is given. As Czech and Spanish vocalic systems are very similar, the subtile phonetic differences are to be detected in the second part where realizations of these two vowels in selected consonantal contexts are analysed. Key words: Second Language Acquisition, Phonetics, Interlanguage, Spanish, high front vowel.

Les mots étant rarement produits hors contexte phrastique, les enfants vont devoir les extraire du flux de parole pour les apprendre. Les probabilités de transition (Saffran et al., 1996) et les unités rythmiques (Nazzi et al., 2006) seraient cruciales à l'émergence de la segmentation. Les formes sonores segmentées seront par la suite mémorisées en représentations phonétiquement détaillées. Cependant, selon Nespor et al. (2003) les consonnes seraient plus impliquées au niveau lexical que les voyelles, proposant un biais consonantique dans la reconnaissance des formes sonores segmentées. Le premier axe de ma thèse s'intéresse aux capacités précoces de segmentation chez les enfants francophones nés à terme et prématurés afin de déterminer quand elles émergent et dans quelle mesure les unités rythmiques sont impliquées. Le second s'intéresse à l'émergence et à l'origine du biais consonantique. Les résultats montrent que (1) les enfants nés à terme et prématurés sont capables de segmenter la parole en utilisant l'unité syllabique dès 6 mois ; (2) d'un biais vocalique à 6 mois, les enfants francophones, acquièrent un biais consonantique à 8 mois dans la reconnaissance de formes sonores segmentées ; (3) le biais consonantique proviendrait donc de l'acquisition des propriétés acoustiques/phonétiques de la langue maternelle. / Since words are rarely produced in isolation, one of the first steps in acquiring new words is to segment them from continuous speech. Transitional probabilities (Saffran et al., 1996) and rhythmic units (Nazzi et al., 2006) have been proposed to be crucial at segmentation onset. Segmented word forms will then have to be stored as phonetically-specified representations for future recognition. However, Nespor et al. (2003) hypothesized that consonants, more than vowels, are involved at the lexical level, proposing a consonant bias in early word processing.The first part of my dissertation investigates preterm and full-term infants' segmentation abilities to determine when they emerge and to what extent rhythmic units are involved. The second part investigates the emergence and origin of the consonant bias in recognizing segmented word forms with full-term infants. Results show that (1) both preterm and full-term 6-month-olds are able to segment speech by using syllabic units; (2) French-learning infants switch from a vowel bias at 6 months to an adult-like consonant bias in recognizing segmented word forms; (3) the consonant bias emerging between 6 and 8 months of age, it would result from the processing and learning of the acoustic/phonetic properties on the language being acquired.

This thesis examines the difficulties that beginning and advanced American learners of Portuguese have correctly perceiving and producing the Portuguese mid-vowels {o} and {e}. The beginning learners were enrolled in their second semester of Portuguese and had rudimentary knowledge of Portuguese. The advanced learners had all lived in Brazil for nearly two years and were enrolled in a more advanced Portuguese course. To test for production, informants were asked to read a group of sentences that contained one hundred occurrences of the Portuguese mid-vowels. Each production occurrence was evaluated as being correct or incorrect by linguistically trained native Brazilians. To test for perception, informants were evaluated on their ability to distinguish between tokens (individual vowel sounds) spoken in context by native Brazilian speakers. These tokens used to test perception were recorded in a professional recording studio in Brazil. The study found that beginning and advanced learners had difficulty perceiving and correctly producing the Portuguese mid-vowels. In the perception study, beginners scored 70% on the {o} section and 68% on the {e} section, for a combined score of 69%. The advanced learners scored 78% on the {o} section and 78% on {e} section, for an average score of 78%. In the production study, the advanced learners scored an average of 42% on the open vowels and 84% on the closed vowels. The beginners scored 23% on the open vowels and 97% on the closed vowels. The most striking finding in the study was that advanced learners scored lower on the closed vowel production section than did the beginners. This was due to a hypercorrection phenomenon in the advanced learners. The advanced learners, once they learned that open vowels exist in Portuguese, seemed to produce them sporadically in their speech. They tended to open many vowels that should have been closed. Beginners, however, rarely used any open vowels in their speech. Beginners showed a strong correlation between perception and production capabilities. Advanced learners, however, did not demonstrate a strong perception-production correlation. The author of this thesis can be contacted at richard@medlar.com

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has received more attention in recent years as a treatment option for regulating the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Previous studies of DBS documented consistent improvements in motor function but more variability in speech outcomes. In the present study, six participants diagnosed with idiopathic Parkinson's disease who reported worsened speech with stimulation were recorded performing speech acoustic tasks with the stimulators on, and again with the stimulators off. Improvements were noted for most participants in measurements of formant slopes, long term average spectrum (LTAS) of a sustained vowel, and spirantization with stimulation on. Stimulation negatively affected most participants' vowel space area, verbal fluency, sequential motion rate, and LTAS while reading and describing a picture. Measures of stop gap duration, alternating motion rate, and voice onset time were within normal limits for most participants across both stimulation conditions.

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.

Background Previous research has emphasized the importance of objectivity in voice quality evaluation. Acoustic voice quality index (AVQI) is a multiparametric objective index, that quantifies overall voice quality. Over the past decade, international studies have demonstrated strong diagnostic accuracy and sensitivity of AVQI to voice disorders. Ithas yet been inconclusive whether AVQI is independent of factors such as age and gender or if AVQI is affected by different types of continuous speech segments.  Aim  The aim of this study is to gather descriptive data regarding AVQI’s performance in a healthy Swedish-speaking population. Another objective is to investigate the potential impact of varying characteristics, such as age and gender, and type of continuous speech samples on the AVQI values.  Method  The present study gathered speech samples from 137 participants aged 20 to 90 years with a balanced gender distribution. These samples contained two different types of continuous speech, from which separate AVQI valuesin the acoustic analysis were computed. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was then used to study the effects of age, gender, and type of continuous speech used on the resulting AVQI values.  Results  Descriptive normative data was gathered for the overall voice quality of the age groups included in this study. A statistically significant main effect of age on the AVQI values was observed. Statistical analysis revealed no significant effect of speech type, speaker gender or the interaction of age and gender on the AVQI values.   Conclusions  In conclusion, the present study offered data for AVQI values in the Swedish-speaking population. AVQI scores were higher in older participants compared to the younger participants. No other significant effects were found in this study. AVQI values obtained in this study and comparisons carried out with international AVQI values indicatepotentially successful use of the acoustic voice quality index in the Swedish-speaking population with some precautions.

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