Can a prosodic pattern induce/ reduce the perception of a lower-class suburban accent in French?

Philippe Boula de Mareüil1 & Iryna Lehka-Lemarchand2

1 LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France2 Université de Rouen, Rouen, France

Introduction: French context

Linguistic features specific to lower-class youth in France

lexicon = favoured level of analysis pronunciation peculiarities

Accent de banlieue (‘suburban accent’)

very different connotation from that of the Anglo world often associated with violence, unemployment, immigration

Previous phonetic studies

Usually focusing on the segmental aspects of the banlieue accent

pharyngealisation of // palatalisation/affrication of /t/ and /d/ before high front vowels

Particular prosodic patterns

relative lengthening of the penultimate syllable pitch rise followed by an abrupt fall on the final syllable

before a prosodic boundary

observed in the suburbs of Paris and Rouen (80 miles west from Paris, in Normandy)

most often, starting from a high (H) tone and not associated with lengthening

Present study: questions

Investigating how this prosodic pattern in adolescents from the suburb of Rouen is perceived by listeners living in Normandy and listeners living in the Paris region

What is the contribution of this sharp fall (referred to as HL fall) to an impression of suburban accent?

Does its presence/absence entail the perception of a higher/lower degree of accentedness?

To what extent does perception depend on subjects’ region and social proximity to the suburb of Rouen?

General outline

Study based on prosody modification and resynthesis

Corpus and method

Perceptual experiments

Results and discussion

Corpus

Spontaneous speech collected among 11 male adolescents (aged 14 to 17) who lived in the suburb of Rouen

two speakers with metropolitan French parents another two from French overseas departments the others of African descent

Recordings made during directed interviews

For each speaker, 10-second prosodically marked and unmarked utterances (i.e. exhibiting HL falls or not) selected

Method

HL fall = a slope steeper than -5 ST between the end and the beginning of the word-final syllable

Using the PSOLA algorithm implemented in Praat

prosodically marked utterances rendered unmarked by smoothing the HL falls (especially by lowering the H tone)

prosodically unmarked utterances rendered marked by modifying their pitch contours (especially by raising the H tone in the word-final syllable onset)

Stimuli

Test material composed of 44 utterances

11 marked original (MO) 11 unmarked synthesised (US) 11 unmarked original (UO) 11 marked synthesised (MS)

As many high-low falls in the MO and MS utterances: 22 (i.e. 2 per utterance on average)

1–3 HL falls in MO utterances 1–4 HL falls in MS utterances

Illustration and measurements

MO pitch curve excerpt, with two HL falls on word-final vowel nuclei

-5 ST -9 ST

Stimulus MO US UO MS

Slope (ST) -8.4 -2.0 -0.7 -8.8

Illustration and measurements

MO pitch curve excerpt, with two HL falls on word-final vowel nuclei

-5 ST -9 ST

Stimulus MO US UO MS

Slope (ST) -8.4 -2.0 -0.7 -8.8

Perceptual experiment: task

Through a web-based interface self-estimating the passive (indirect) and active (direct)

exposure to the suburban accent familiarisation phase

Test proper rating the degree of accentedness on a continuous 0–5

scale (0 = no accent; 5 = very strong accent) specifying if certain words or syllables sounded particularly

marked by the suburban accent (optional task)

Final comments and answers to a couple of questions

Listeners

20 listeners from Normandy (aged 19 on average)

20 listeners living in the Paris region (aged 28 on average)

For most listeners rather frequent passive exposure to the suburban accent, even though the active exposure is rarer

In age and geographical proximity, listeners from Normandy closer to the test speakers than listeners from the Paris region

However, active exposure to the suburban accent some-what more frequent in the subjects from the Paris region

Perceptual results: ratings

No main effect of listeners’ Group (Normandy vs. Paris region), but a significant effect of the Type of stimulus (MO, US, UO or MS)

In both groups of listeners, MO stimuli perceived as more accented than US stimuli, and MS stimuli perceived as more accented than UO stimuli (significant differences according to pairwise t-tests)

Stimuli MO US UO MSNormandy 2.7 2.4 2.1 2.4

Paris region 2.8 2.5 2.1 2.4Average 2.7 2.4 2.1 2.4

Perceptual results: salient cues

Pinpointed words classified according to whether or not they were target words, whose pitch contours were modified

Target words more often pointed out in the MO and MS stimuli

Importance of prosody confirmed by final comments

0

100

200

300

400

MO US UO MS

Other word

Target word

Experimental results: final questions

Q.: Where do these youngsters live, according to you? for 8 listeners from the Paris region and 4 listeners from

Normandy, associations with the suburb of Paris possible generalisations to other suburbs of the northern half

of France, with Paris playing an emblematic role

Q’: Did many (at least 10) utterances sound artificial? positive answer in only 4 subjects from the Paris region and

11 from Normandy reassuring result as far as the naturalness of the 22

acoustically modified stimuli is concerned

Discussion and conclusion

Study concentrated on the perception of an atypical prosodic pattern (a final HL fall) in French

Robust results involving listeners from two French regions, suggesting that this HL fall is indexical of the suburban accent and may function as a marker of identity

More and more associated with the ethno-geographic origin, especially from the Maghreb, in folk comments

Caution needed about the role of Arabic in the French suburban accent

Acknowledgements Work partially financed by ANR within the framework of the PADE

project

Thank you for your attention

Speakers

Two speakers set aside for a familiarisation phase

For the test proper, two prosodically marked and two prosodically unmarked utterances (plus their counterparts modified by synthesis) kept for two speakers

Only one prosodically marked utterance and one prosodically unmarked utterance (plus their counterparts modified by synthesis) kept for the remaining 7 speakers