Catégorie d'actualités: Release

How can species as far apart as dogs and humans understand each other?

The Institut Pasteur has just issued a press release on the study conducted by researchers from the University of Geneva, the Institut de l'Audition and the CRPN Marseille  in collaboration with Thierry Legou (LPL), published in the journal PLOS Biology in October:

 Reference: Déaux EC, Piette T, Gaunet F, Legou T, Arnal L, Giraud A-L (2024) Dog-human vocal interactions match dogs' sensory-motor tuning. PLoS Biol 22(10): e3002789.

Full text article: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3002789

This study ‘reveals that the pair meet halfway between their differences to communicate together. From their results, the researchers hypothesise that dogs and humans have co-adapted to be able to communicate together. Comparison with other canids that have not been domesticated by humans, such as wolves, would reveal which of the dog's linguistic abilities are due to its genetics and which are due to its socialisation’.

 

Crédits : Thierry Legou, LPL

 

State of the art of ‘graded resources’ for foreign language teaching

We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest article by Núria Gala (LPL-AMU) in collaboration with Thomas François from the Centre for Automatic Language Processing (CENTAL UCL) in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics :

Reference: Thomas François, Núria Gala. Graded resources for learning and teaching foreign languages. ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2024, ⟨10.1075/itl.00024.fra⟩. ⟨hal-04697842⟩

Article on the publisher's website (restricted access): https://dx.doi.org/10.1075/itl.00024.fra

Reference on HAL: https://hal.science/hal-04697842

Abstract:
Innovative resources for teaching vocabulary have emerged during the last decades, among which the so-called ‘graded resources’, i.e. lexicons or inventories where linguistic forms have been associated with a difficulty level, having in mind a target reader. The idea of ‘grading’ in Education is not new and has evolved over time: vocabulary or text scales (grades) have been approached as an educational tool with the means available at each period of time. In this survey, our aim is to show how current approaches of graded resources for foreign language learning are rooted in the tradition of building frequency lists for education. We then synthesize the body of work that has been undertaken to design graduated resources, highlighting the different methodologies applied as well as existing resources.

 

Credits: Image by freepik (ed.)

Prediction of events in human language processing and pretrained language models

We are pleased to announce a new paper published by Philippe Blache (LPL) in collaboration with researchers from Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Procore Project) and Purdue University:

Reference: James Britton, Yan Cong, Yu-Yin Hsu, Emmanuele Chersoni, Philippe Blache. On the influence of discourse connectives on the predictions of humans and language models. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2024, 18, pp.1363120. ⟨10.3389/fnhum.2024.1363120⟩. ⟨hal-04717106⟩

Full-text article: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1363120

Abstract:
This paper investigates how humans and language models process event predictions in sentences, focusing on the role of discourse connectives like and, but, and because. Humans find congruent sentence sequences easier to understand, and these connectives help clarify event relationships, especially when predictions need to be reversed (e.g., concessives and contrastives). The study used Italian and Mandarin Chinese story stimuli to test plausibility and coherence with or without connectives. Results show Mandarin language models are somewhat sensitive to these factors but struggle with prediction reversals, while Italian models showed no significant alignment with human data.

 

Credits: Authors

Difficulties in learning new words in moderate preterm infants aged 18 months

In its scientific news section, CNRS SHS highlights the latest article published by our colleague Clément François, in collaboration with Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, Xim Cerda-Company, Thaïs Agut and Laura Bosch, in one of the most prestigious journals on development:

Reference :
François C., Rodriguez-Fornells A., Cerda-Company X., Agut T., Bosch L. 2024, Impact of late to moderate preterm birth on minimal pair word-learning, Child Development.

Full text article: https://hal.science/hal-04671814

CNRS SHS press release (in French): https://www.inshs.cnrs.fr/fr/cnrsinfo/difficultes-dapprentissage-de-nouveaux-mots-chez-les-prematures-moderes-de-18-mois

 

 

Credits: Authors

 

What impact do head nods have on prosodic prominence?

We are pleased to announce the latest publication by Mariapaola d'Imperio - AMU professor and member of the LPL - in collaboration with Christopher Carignan, Núria Esteve-Gibert, Hélène Lœvenbruck and Marion Dohen in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America:

Reference: Carignan, C., Esteve-Gibert, N., Lœvenbruck, H., Dohen, M., D'Imperio, M. (2024). Co-speech head nods are used to enhance prosodic prominence at different levels of narrow focus in French. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Access to the full text of the article (via AMU): https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/156/3/1720/3312732/Co-speech-head-nods-are-used-to-enhance-prosodic

 

 

Credits: Authors

How is your feedback perceived?

We are pleased to announce the latest article by Auriane Boudin (LPL doctoral student and first author of the study), Stéphane Rauzy, Roxane Bertrand and Philippe Blache from the LPL and Magali Ochs from LIS Marseille.

Auriane will also be defending her doctoral thesis on 20 November which aims to describe the behaviour of listeners and their production of feedback through an interdisciplinary approach.

Reference: Auriane Boudin, Stéphane Rauzy, Roxane Bertrand, Magalie Ochs, Philippe Blache. How is your feedback perceived? An experimental study of anticipated and delayed conversational feedback. JASA Express Letters, 2024, 4 (7), ⟨10.1121/10.0026448⟩. ⟨hal-04687738⟩

Link to the journal: https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jel/article/4/7/075201/3302959
Link to the abstract & full text in HAL: https://hal.science/hal-04687738

 

 Credits: Authors (figures), JASA EL (cover)

What impact can unilateral laryngeal paralysis have on the expression of emotions?

Several members of the Phoniatry team at Marseille's La Conception University Hospital and the LPL have published this month a new scientific article studying the impact of laryngeal paralysis on the speaker's vocal transmission of emotions.

Reference: Ralph Haddad, Alexia Mattei, Caterina Petrone, Marie Cachi-Pouyenne, Estelle Bogdanski, Camille Galant, Antoine Giovanni (2024). Alterations in Emotional Expression Through Speech in Patients With Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis: A Preliminary Study. Journal of Voice (online 2024/08/08)

⟨https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2024.07.010⟩.

 

Link to the full text article: Alterations in Emotional Expression Through Speech in Patients With Unilateral Vocal Fold Paralysis: A Preliminary Study - ScienceDirect (univ-amu.fr)

 

A: Equal distribution of sentences produced by patients with laryngeal paralysis in neutral, anger and sadness.
B: Uneven perception of emotions by the jury, who consider the sentences heard to be mainly neutral in emotion.

Credits: Elsevier (1st ill.) / the authors (2nd ill.)

Half a century of speech prosody research in Aix-en-Provence

In its "Bookshop" section, CNRS SHS highlights the latest book by Daniel Hirst, Emeritus Research Director at the LPL, published last June by Springer: "Speech Prosody: From Acoustics to Interpretation".

Co-founder of SProSIG in 2000, an international group for the study of speech prosody under the umbrella of ISCA and IPA, and organizer of the first international congress on prosody in 2002 (which became "Speech Prosody"), the author presents a personal vision of speech prosody in general, and more specifically of the various themes in which he has been interested for several decades. Topics covered include the acoustic description of prosody, its transcription, the relationship between lexical and non-lexical prosody, the nature of prosodic structure, the phonology of prosody, the modeling of speech rhythm and melody, and the central question of the varied and sometimes rather mysterious ways in which prosody contributes to the interpretation of utterances. In his final chapter, Daniel Hirst outlines the directions he believes will be most productive and fruitful for future research into speech prosody.

Reference: Daniel Hirst. Speech Prosody: From Acoustics to Interpretation. Springer Verlag, Berlin. Juin 2024. https://link.springer.com/book/9783642407710

 

Credits: Springer Verlag

Difficulties in learning specialty vocabulary at school: the case of opaque verbs

We are pleased to announce the publication of the latest article by Núria Gala and Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, two AMU senior lecturers at the LPL, in collaboration with Ludivine Javourey-Drevet of the SCALab (Villeneuve d'Ascq) in the journal “Lexique”:

Reference: Núria Gala, Marie-Noëlle Roubaud, Ludivine Javourey-Drevet. La difficulté d'apprentissage du vocabulaire de spécialité à l'école: le cas des verbes opaques. Lexique, July 2024, 34. ⟨hal-04580153⟩

Full-text article (in French): https://www.peren-revues.fr/lexique/1727

Abstract:
This work has been carried out with the aim of shedding light on the lexical knowledge of middle-school learners regarding vocabulary from domain-specific texts. We analyse a series of opaque verbs (polysemous, frequent in history and science textbooks) and we draw up an assessment of the lexical knowledge of 219 children from grades 4 and 5 (aged 9 to 11) in different schools in France. We also show the strategies used by learners to respond to the proposed task of writing a sentence with a given verb out of context.

 

Crédits d’image : Drazen Zigic sur Freepik

 

New article published in “Language, Cognition and Neuroscience”

Thanks to an electroencephalographic study, two CNRS researchers at LPL have shown that, in native French speakers, an accentual difference on the isolated word has no impact on its recognition. This result suggests that, for these speakers, acoustic cues related to accentuation are treated as noise and are swept out of the speech signal during the word recognition process.

Reference: Dufour, Sophie & Michelas, Amandine (2024). Does a mismatch on the accentual pattern of French words affect the magnitude of the repetition priming effect? An ERP investigation. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 1-8.

The article on HAL: https://hal.science/hal-04601476
(Currently embargoed)

 

 

Crédits : Pixabay / GDJ