Many of my publications are available on my ResearchGate page.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4004-2067Current research areas
Production of prosody by native and non-native speakers of French, and perception by native listeners
This study looks at the production of prominence and phrasing by English-speaking learners of French, compared to native speakers of French. Because of the differences in the prosodic structure of these two languages, they form an ideal testbed for theories about the factors influencing learners’ success at acquiring native-like pronunciation of a second language. Recordings of native French speakers, and of advanced L2 speakers of French whose native language is American English, were made during October and November 2021 at the Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie in Paris. Native French listeners’ perception of these recordings was examined through Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT), collected at the Université Lyon 2 in March 2022 with the assistance of colleagues at the Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage. Many thanks to the members of these institutions for their assistance.
A preliminary account of a partial analysis can be found in my paper in the Actes des JEP2022 (in French).
Native listeners’ perception of prosody produced by non-native speakers of English
This study (done in collaboration with Paul Edmunds and Jacqueline Hirsh Greene) investigates how native American English listeners perceive two aspects of prosody, phrasal boundaries and prominence, in the speech of native and L2 speakers of English. The L2 speakers, whose native language was Latin American Spanish, were advanced students at CELAC, the University of New Mexico’s center for teaching English to international students.
We used Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) to investigate listeners’ perceptions of the prosody produced by the native and non-native speakers as they read aloud. RPT offers a language-independent tool to access listeners’ holistic understanding of prosody. Listeners hear an audio recording of speech while following along on an orthographic, unpunctuated transcript of the recording. They indicate their perception of phrasal boundaries or prominent words by marking them on the transcript in real time. Compared to acoustic analysis, studying listener reactions provides more insight into what aspects of non-native prosody are most salient. This may be useful in guiding learners to the most effective ways to improve their prosody. Also, listeners respond to the signal as a whole, while measurement of individual acoustic parameters may fail to capture the relevant dimensions.
Portions of this research were presented at Interspeech 2013 in Lyon, France; you can see the paper here. A more complete account is forthcoming.
Previous Projects
Constituents and heads in prosody perception: A comparative study
This was an NSF-funded project in collaboration with Jennifer Cole, Northwestern University and José Hualde of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The project investigated the relation between prosodic phrases and their heads, and more broadly, the perception of prominence and phrasing, in English, Spanish, and French. I contributed the French part of the project.
Comparing the prosody of these three languages is interesting because they are known to differ with respect to how prosody is structured, how it is manifested acoustically, and in its relation to meaning. Results of this project are reported in a paper (open access) in the Journal of Phonetics's special issue on Integrating phonetics and phonology in the study of linguistic prominence (eds. Francesco Cangemi and Stefan Baumann).
In addition, as part of this project, Ricardo Napoleão de Souza and I have studied the production of corrective focus and disclocations in French, using the Nijmegen Corpus of Conversational French. We have observed an almost complete absence of the acoustic markers that have been proposed in the literature for these constructions. Our working hypothesis is that in conversation, information shared by speakers and listeners permits extensive “prosodic reduction”. We have reported some of these results at ICPhS in Glasgow (Smith and Napoleão de Souza)and LabPhon at Cornell (Napoleão de Souza and Smith).
Articulatory correlates of prominence in French: Comparing L1 and L2 speakers
Results of this project are reported in a paper in the Journal of Phonetics's special issue on Integrating phonetics and phonology in the study of linguistic prominence (eds. Francesco Cangemi and Stefan Baumann).