the effects of syllable position on allophonic variation

The effects of syllable position on allophonic

variation in Québec French /ʀ/

Peter Milne Université d’Ottawa

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NWAV40 October 29, 2011

Presentation Objectives

The value in working with large natural language corpora is the ability to obtain large amounts of data to test research hypotheses.

– Studies at the level of the utterance can provide a comprehensive and coherent account of phonological alternations.

– The use of a corpus is an important instrument to examine the behavior of words in connected speech.

– A corpus allows quatitative and qualitative analyses far superior to intuition alone.

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The challenge is to quickly and systematically extract the data from the corpus.

– Accumulating the linguistic data required to test and evaluate hypotheses is a time consuming and labour intensive job.

– Assisted segmentation of speech data may take as much as 10 times real time (Goldman, 2011).

– Full manual segmentation may take as much as 800 times real time (Schiel & Draxler, 2003).

– Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner works well for English, but what about French?

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Describe an automatic aligner that works on a corpus of spoken French to help address this challenge.

– An accurate forced aligner can aid in the analysis of large volumes of natural language data.

– A forced aligner can produce speech segmentation at the word and phone levels in about 5 times real time (Goldman, 2011).

– This aligned speech data can provide contextual and acoustic information about the segment under investigation: /ʀ/

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Research Questions



Describe an automatic aligner that works on a corpus of spoken French to help address this challenge.

Demonstrate a small research study on the effects of syllable position on allophonic variation in Québec French /ʀ/

– Is syllable position related to allophonic variation in Québec French /ʀ/?

– Are there measurable differences between allophones of Québec French /ʀ/?

– Can differences in the allophones be explained with reference to the syllable?

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Overview

/R/

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Overview

/R/

P2FA en français, s’il

vous plait

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Overview

/R/

P2FAData

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Overview

/R/

P2FA

Data

Future Directions

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Allophones of /ʀ/

French rhotics include trills, taps, flaps, fricatives, and approximants – no single physical property shared by all – large numbers of rhotics may co-exist as allophonic and

sociolinguistic variants of same phoneme

/ʀ/ →

[ r ] apical trill[ ʀ ] uvular trill

[ ʁ | χ ] uvular fricative[ ɣ | x ] velar fricative

[ ʁ̞ ] uvular approximant[ ɹ ] alveolar approximant

[ ∅ ] deleted

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Allophones of /ʀ/

French rhotics include trills, taps, flaps, fricatives, and approximants – no single physical property shared by all – large numbers of rhotics may co-exist as allophonic and

sociolinguistic variants of same phoneme

/ʀ/ →

[ r ] apical trill[ ʀ ] uvular trill

[ ʁ | χ ] uvular fricative[ ɣ | x ] velar fricatives

[ ʁ̞ ] uvular approximant[ ɹ ] alveolar approximant

[ ∅ ] deleted

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Allophones of /ʀ/: Historical evidence

/ʀ/ has had a variety of articulations for a very long time. – More than one phonetic realization since at least 14th century – Confusion with alveolar place of articulation

• Early Gaul or Brittany “n” written as “r” in early French – Ling(o)nes → Langres – Lund(i)num → Londres

• Same change from Latin to French – ord(i)nem → ordre – diac(o)num → diacre

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Allophones of /ʀ/: Historical evidence

/ʀ/ has had a variety of articulations for a very long time. – More than one phonetic realization since at least 14th century – Confusion with alveolar place of articulation – Confusion with velar place of articulation

• Early Brittany velars “c'h” also written as “r” – (k)nech → Ners – Pen-Nec'h → Pennère

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Allophones of /ʀ/: Phonetic evidence

/ʀ/ has had a variety of articulations for a very long time – [ ʀ ~ ʁ|χ ~ ʁ̞ ] all share similar place of articulation

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Allophones of /ʀ/: Phonetic evidence

/ʀ/ has had a variety of articulations for a very long time – [ ʀ ~ ʁ|χ ~ ʁ̞ ] all share similar place of articulation – all varieties are relatively sonorous and vocalic in nature

Borel-Maisonny (1942): Paris – not place of articulation, but size of aperture of the constriction,

laryngeal voicing, presence of vibrations Vinay (1950): Québec

– mostly [ʁ] with “appreciable frication noise” Delattre (1969): Urban Paris

– pharyngeal consonant with articulation involving root of tongue Santerre (1982): Montréal

– [ʀ] very sonorous with no high frequency noise

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Allophones of /ʀ/: Sociolinguistic evidence

[r] is no longer a dominant variety Most authors make reference to syllable position when describing /ʀ/

distributions – Vinay (1950): [ʀ] as geographic – Clermont & Cedergren (1979): [ʀ] in codas – Tousignant (1983, 1987): [ʀ] pre-vocalic > post-consonantal; [ʁ]

post-vocalic or end of syllable – Sankoff, Blondeau & Charity (2001): [ʀ, ʁ] more frequent in

codas.

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Allophones of /ʀ/: Sociolinguistic evidence

/ʀ/ has had a variety of articulations for a very long time – [ ʀ ~ ʁ|χ ~ ʁ̞ ] share similar place of articulation – all varieties are relatively sonorous and vocalic in nature

[ ʁ̞ ] is becoming more frequent – [ʀ] commonly replaced by fricatives or approximants

• informal speech, approximants becoming dominant allophone

• emphatic or careful speech, fricatives becoming dominant allophone

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Allophones of /ʀ/: Summary

/ʀ/ has had a variety of articulations for a very long time – [ ʀ ~ ʁ|χ ~ ʁ̞] share similar place of articulation – all varieties are relatively sonorous and vocalic in nature – [ ʁ̞] is becoming more frequent

Most authors make reference to syllable position when describing /ʀ/ distributions

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The Corpus

– Hansen archives of political debate • Assemblée nationale du Québec

– One week of debates • June 12-16, 2007 • > 6 hours of speech • 61 speakers (43 male, 18 female) • Age range from 24--67

N of Speakers Sex M = 19

Ages (Avg) 24-67 (51)

Years in Office (Avg) 1-31 (7)

26 F = 7 37-51 (41) 4-13 (8)

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The forced aligner: P2FA

P2FA: Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner (Yuan and Liberman, 2008) – is an automatic phonetic alignment toolkit based on HTK

(Hidden Markov Model Toolkit), – takes as input a .wav audio file and a .txt orthographic

transcription file, – used in conjunction with a pronunciation dictionary, – produces a Praat TextGrid (Boersma) with interval boundaries

for both words and phones.

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An aligned example

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P2FA: Dictionary Modifications

Pronunciation dictionary: – Lexique, version 3 (New et al, 2001, 2004)

• >135,000 words • includes orthographic, phonemic, syllabification, part of

speech, gender, number, frequency – Word list generated from transcription

• ortho [outsym] [probability] P1 P2 P3 etc • expanded with alternate pronunciations

– ministre [] [] m i n i s t ʁ – ministre [] [] m i n i s t – ministre [] [] m i n i s – ministre [] [] m i n i s t ʁ ә

• 235,401 entries

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P2FA: Acoustic Model Mappings

Identical consonant mappings: – [b d f g j k l m n p s t v w z ʃ ʒ]

Identical vowel mappings: – [e a i o u ә ɛ ɔ]

Ad hoc mappings: – œ̃ → UH2 “contain” – ɛ ̃→ EY0 “complain” – ɑ̃ → AA1 “song” – ø → AH0 “popular” – œ → AH0 “foot” – ɔ̃ → AA0 “pond” – y → UW1 “dew” – ʀ → HH “hot”

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An aligned example

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An aligned example

start phone = start word = word initial

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An aligned example

“e” + “ә” = V_V

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An aligned example

V_V + word initial: “les recommandations” =

SimpleOnset

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Syllable position by Context

SimpleOnset SimpleCoda ComplexOnset ComplexCoda

V_V ☺ ☺

C_V ☺ ☺ ☺

V_C ☺

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Acoustic measurements

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Acoustic measurements: Intensity

Minimum intensity

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Energy in first formant

floor = f1-.5(bandwidth) ceiling = f1+.5(bandwidth) Energy in first formant: Get band energy... floor ceiling

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Centre of gravity

Centre of gravity: stop filtered at 500Hz

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Variables explained

Dependent Variables – Energy in first formant and Centre of Gravity

• Both of these values relate to measurements of both energy and frequency.

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Variables explained


• [ ʁ χ ] ≠ [ ʀ ʁ̞ ]

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Variables explained


Independent Variables – Allophone (2 levels)

• Approximants [ ʀ ʁ̞] – expect to have higher values for formant energy,

lower values for centre of gravity • Fricatives [ ʁ χ ]

– expect to have lower values for formant energy, higher values for centre of gravity

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Variables explained


Independent Variables – Allophone (2 levels) – Syllable (4 levels)

• SimpleOnset • SimpleCoda • ComplexOnset • ComplexCoda

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Variables explained


Independent Variables – Allophone (2 levels) – Syllable (4 levels)

Control for Context – V_V, C_V, V_C

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Q1: Syllable position and allophonic variation

Is syllable position related to allophonic variation in Québec French /ʀ/?

Relationship between syllable position and allophonic variation tested through contingency tables with χ2 values to evaluate relationship.

– Isolate two conditions in order to control for either syllable position or context.

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Q1 Similar contexts: V_V

V_V SimpleOnset SimpleCoda Totals

Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 195 33 228

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 95 15 110

Totals 290 48 338

Intervocalic context has two syllable positions: SimpleOnset and SimpleCoda

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Q1 Similar contexts: V_V

V_V SimpleOnset SimpleCoda Totals

Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 195 (196) 33 (32) 228

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 95 (94) 15 (16) 110

Totals 290 48 338

Intervocalic context has two syllable positions: SimpleOnset and SimpleCoda

Intervocalic context (V_V) – χ2(1)=0.43, p=0.836 – odds ratio = 0.93 – equally likely to be Approximant [ʀ ʁ̞] in onset or coda

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Q1 Similar contexts: C_V

SimpleOnset ComplexOnset ComplexCoda TotalsApproximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 2 60 2 64

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 8 143 18 169Totals 10 203 20 233

Post-consonantal context has three syllable positions: SimpleOnset, ComplexOnset, ComplexCoda

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Q1 Similar contexts: C_V

SimpleOnset ComplexOnset ComplexCoda TotalsApproximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 2 (3) 60 (56) 2 (5) 64

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 8 (7) 143 (147) 18 (15) 169Totals 10 203 20 233

Post-consonantal context has three syllable positions: SimpleOnset, ComplexOnset, ComplexCoda

Post-consonantal context (C_V) – χ2(2)=3.788, p=0.150 – odds ratio = 1.68 – slightly more likely to be [+son] in ComplexOnset than

SimpleOnset

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Q1 Similar syllables: SimpleOnset

V_V C_V TotalsApproximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 195 2 197

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 95 8 103Totals 290 10 300

SimpleOnset can occur in two contexts: intervocalic (V_V) or post-consonantal (C_V)

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Q1 Similar syllables: SimpleOnset

V_V C_V TotalsApproximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 195 (190) 2 (7) 197

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 95 (100) 8 (3) 103Totals 290 10 300

SimpleOnset can occur in two contexts: intervocalic (V_V) or post-consonantal (C_V)

– χ2(1)=9.569, p=0.002 – odds ratio = 8.2 – more likely to be [ʀ ʁ̞] in V_V than C_V

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Q1 Similar syllables: SimpleCoda

V_V V_C TotalsApproximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 33 0 33

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 15 12 27Totals 48 12 60

SimpleCodas can occur in two contexts: intervocalic (V_V) or pre-consonantal (V_C).

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Q1 Similar syllables: SimpleCoda

V_V V_C TotalsApproximants [ʀ ʁ̞] 33 (26) 0 (7) 33

Fricatives [ʁ χ] 15 (22) 12 (5) 27Totals 48 12 60

SimpleCodas can occur in two contexts: intervocalic (V_V) or pre-consonantal (V_C).

– χ2(1)=18.333, p<0.001 – odds ratio = 27.5 – much more likely to be [ʀ ʁ̞] in V_V than V_C

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– Possibly not. – In similar contexts, differences between Observed and

Expected frequencies are not significant. • Although need to test more syllable positions to be sure.

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– Possibly not. – In similar contexts, differences between Observed and

Expected frequencies are not significant. Is context related to allophonic variation in Québec French /ʀ/?

– Possibly. – In similar syllable positions, approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] are more likely

to occur intervocalically (V_V) than either post- or pre-consonantally (C_V, V_C). • Although need to test more syllable positions.

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Q2: Differences between allophones

Are there measurable differences between allophones of Québec French /ʀ/?

Can differences in the allophones be explained with reference to the syllable?

Differences in related dependent variables (energy in first formant, centre of gravity) according to independent variables (syllable position, allophone) tested through multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA).

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Differences in related dependent variables (energy in first formant, centre of gravity) according to independent variables (syllable position, allophone) tested through multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA).

– Separate statistical models for each of two contexts: • Intervocalic (V_V) • Post-consonantal (C_V)

– 581 items drawn from corpus

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Q2: Summary Statistics

V_V EF1 COGSimpleOnset Approximants [ ʀ ʁ̞ ] 1.248 (0.891) 1459 (432)

Fricatives [ ʁ χ ] 0.724 (0.682) 1690 (445)SimpleCoda Approximants [ ʀ ʁ̞ ] 1.067 (0.675) 1258 (303)

Fricatives [ ʁ χ ] 0.859 (0.860) 1350 (296)C_VSimpleOnset Approximants [ ʀ ʁ̞ ] 0.807 (0.615) 1483 (336)

Fricatives [ ʁ χ ] 0.400 (0.403) 1739 (530)ComplexOnset Approximants [ ʀ ʁ̞ ] 0.975 (0.699) 1516 (502)

Fricatives [ ʁ χ ] 0.531 (0.546) 1760 (625)ComplexCoda Approximants [ ʀ ʁ̞ ] 0.876 (0.772) 1106 (338)

Fricatives [ ʁ χ ] 0.435 (0.700) 1751 (550)

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Q2 Results: Intervocalic V_V

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Q2 V_V: Main effect of syllable positionF(1,334) = 7.478, p < 0.001

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Q2 V_V: Main effect of allophones

F(1,334) = 20.607, p < 0.001

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Q2 V_V: Differences in centre of gravity by syllable position

Main effect of syllable due to different values for centre of gravity. F(1,334) = 14.270, p < 0.001 Centre of gravity is lower in SimpleCodas than in SimpleOnsets

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Q2 V_V: Differences in energy in first formant by allophones

Effect of allophones due to different values for energy in first formant. F(1,334) = 25.605, p < 0.001 Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] had higher values for energy in first formant than Fricatives [ʁ χ].

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Q2 V_V: Differences in centre of gravity by allophones

Effect of allophones due to different values for centre of gravity. F(1,334) = 18.775, p < 0.001 Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] had lower values for centre of gravity than Fricatives [ʁ χ].

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Q2 Results: Post-consonantal C_V

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Q2 C_V: Main effect of allophonesF(2,237) = 15.497, p < 0.001

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Q2 C_V: Differences in energy in first formant by allophones

Effect of allophones due to different values for energy in first formant. F(1,237) = 25.552, p < 0.001 Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] had higher values for energy in first formant than Fricatives [ʁ χ].

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Q2 C_V: Differences in centre of gravity by allophones

Effect of allophones due to different values for centre of gravity. F(2,237) = 9.757, p = 0.002 Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] had lower values for centre of gravity than Fricatives [ʁ χ].

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– Possibly yes. – Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] had significantly higher values for energy in

first formant and lower values for centre of gravity than Fricatives [ʁ χ]. • This is true for both V_V and C_V items.

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– Possibly yes. – Approximants [ʀ ʁ̞] had significantly higher values for energy in

first formant and lower values for centre of gravity than Fricatives [ʁ χ].


– In this data set, no. – Only intervocalic simple codas showed a significant difference

in centre of gravity.

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Future Directions

To continue with curent thread: – More data from current corpus

• 60+ hours currently available – Add data from other natural language corpora

• Assemblée nationale de France – Extract more “difficult” syllable positions

• V_C = ComplexCoda – Systematically identify allophones

• Discriminant analysis

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Future Directions

To continue with curent thread: To expand in different directions:

– Larger corpora • data from other corpora?

– Longitudinal studies of change • Assemblée nationale du Québec archives?

– Dialectal variation • data from Phonologie du Français Contemporain?

– Other examples • schwa omission / insertion? • consonant cluster simplification?

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aix2.uottawa.ca/~pmiln099 [email protected]

Thank You!

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the effects of syllable position on allophonic variation

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