This study focused on whispered speech in which a key feature, the voicing, is missing and examined whether variations in the duration of whispered consonants influence the identification of the voicing feature. We also examined lexical influences on the identification of the voicing feature during whispered speech perception by comparing words (/ʒaʁ/ jars “gander” vs. /ʃaʁ/ char “tank”) and nonwords (/ʒœʁ/ jeur vs. /ʃœʁ/ cheur). We used an identification task on an 11-step continuum going from the fricatives /ʒ/ to /ʃ/. Participants were tested either on the minimal pair of words /ʒaʁ/-/ʃaʁ/ or on the minimal pair of nonwords /ʒœʁ/-/ʃœʁ/. For both words and nonwords, the percentage of identification of the voiced /ʒ/ consonant decreased as the duration of the consonant increased. Inversely, the percentage of identification of the voiceless /ʃ/ consonant increased as the duration of the consonant increased. The effect of consonant duration was found stronger for words than for nonwords. Together, our results strengthen the claim that durational cues of voicing are exploited during whispered speech perception, and influence consonant identification. Moreover, the stronger effect of consonant duration for words than for nonwords indicates that activation of lexical representations exerts some influence on the way whispered consonants are identified. The implications of these results regarding spoken word recognition models are discussed.

The research in Clinical Phonetics aims to improve our knowledge of speech pathologies by comparing phonetic methods and research with clinical data and clinicians’ diagnoses. In France, Clinical Phonetics has developed over the last thirty years bringing together phoneticians, linguists, computer scientists, engineers, physicians, speech therapists and clinicians.The “Laboratoire Parole et Langage” (LPL) has a long experience in this field through many collaborations with local hospitals and other partners at the national level. These collaborations have led to the development of several projects dealing with a wide variety of pathologies (dysphonia, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, cancers of the oral cavity and oropharynx, apraxia, etc.). Traditional phonetic methodologies (analysis of speech production and perception) have been adapted to the specific constraints of pathological speech. In particular, the LPL has strongly questioned and improved aerophonometry, speech intelligibility measurements, transcription of pathological speech, and acoustic analysis.There are many research questions in clinical phonetics, but they can be structured around two main axis: (1) what are the contributions of phonetics research to the assessment of speech pathologies?; (2) how can speech pathologies deepen our understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying speech production and perception? The goal of this work is twofold: first, to assist clinicians in the evaluation of the severity of a disorder, either for a punctual assessment or in a therapeutic evaluation (rehabilitation, surgical, pharmacological, electrophysiological treatment); secondly, to improve our knowledge on speech by characterizing the productions considered as “atypical”.Without being exhaustive, this chapter offers an overview of research in clinical phonetics at the LPL. After a brief history recalling the emergence of clinical phonetics at the LPL, we organized the chapter around the current work carried out at the LPL on laryngeal pathologies, motor disturbances, speech intelligibility and speech planning disorders.The first studies at LPL combining phonetics and clinical studies date back to the mid-1970s–1980s. These studies became a research focus at the LPL in the 1990s, thanks to formal collaborations with the ENT department of the Timone University Hospital in Marseilles. At that time, the main research interest for the ENT department was voice disorders analysis. This first research has continued to develop and the field of investigation has been extended to speech disorders, particularly those of neurological origin, such as motor or speech planning disorders, in which collaborations with the neurology department of the Pays d’Aix Hospital have been decisive. These clinical collaborations have also supported the valorization and dissemination of this research in the socio-economic world, in particular with the invention, manufacture and marketing of the Assisted Voice Evaluation (EVA) device.Laryngeal pathologies were the first area explored and have led to many publications. The establishment of vocal assessment, both at perceptual and instrumental level, has monopolized most of the efforts. Nevertheless, and in spite of the contribution of automatic speech processing, the instrumental approach derived from phonetics remains little applied in clinical practice for various reasons discussed in the chapter. Some perspectives are proposed and may open new horizons for clinical phonetics. Laryngeal pathologies have also addressed questions to the linguistic functioning and the phonological representation of language units, in particular with regard to the voicing feature, which is the basis of a basic and almost universal lexical contrast in the languages of the world.Motor disturbances whose symptoms on speech are grouped under the term dysarthria have also been the object of important studies at the laboratory, particularly in the context of Parkinson’s disease. These studies have contributed to the pathophysiological model of the disease by measuring various parameters of speech in the context of monitoring the disease. For example, the therapeutic effects (drug or electrophysiological) were studied via acoustic and physiological (aerodynamic) instrumental analyses. The prosodic dimension was also given an important place. This work has allowed us to highlight the characteristics of the speech of Parkinson’s patients by integrating the interactions between the pathological disorders and the linguistic structure at different levels of organization.The measurement of speech intelligibility, which is a recurrent theme in the laboratory’s research, as developed strongly and has been integrated into a clinical perspective, first with the work on Parkinson’s disease, then in the context of the after-effects of cancers of the oral cavity and oropharynx. Biases related to speech perception have led to various alternatives to intelligibility test batteries allowing to propose linguistically justified solutions adapted to clinical practice. They have also made it possible to study more precisely the articulation between the various perceptual levels involved in decoding and understanding speech.More recently, questions about the planning of speech production have emerged in the laboratory. Speech pathology and clinical phonetics provide a framework for testing these questions. Research comparing healthy subjects vs. those with cognitive deficits related to multiple sclerosis is being conducted at LPL to explore how cognitive constraints influence speech parameters of planning. Finally, we think that an epistemological and multidisciplinary challenge is now facing clinical phonetics. Clinicians and phoneticians have learned to research and work together on complex problems that have a fundamental research issue but also a societal and public health issue. The challenge is therefore to promote interaction and understanding of the issues that move these two communities. Phoneticians must be able to propose fields of application of their knowledge adapted to the real and practical problems of clinicians; and conversely, clinicians must be able to better propose observations that question and nourish reflections on the models of production, perception and understanding of speech and language.

measuring the mechanisms of nasality than the acoustic analysis. We propose the calculation of a nasal quotient, which measures from the nasal airflow the percentage in duration of nasalization of a phoneme. Our study concerns a corpus of 20 speakers. Adopting the approach of experimental phonology, we show that the southern Vn are clearly less nasalized than those of the non-southern speakers, confirming, on a large corpus, the result of previous studies. However, on all phonemes, southerners nasalize no less than non-southerners. The orality of nasal vowels would therefore not be a strictly physiological behavior, but a linguistic one, which allows us to feed the debate on their phonological nature.

Cette etude s’interesse a la reconnaissance du trait de voisement en parole chuchotee. Nos travaux anterieurs (Dufour & Meynadier 2019) montrent une reconnaissance plus tardive du trait [+voise] reposant sur un traitement probablement pre-lexical d’informations acoustiques, autres que la vibration laryngee, extraites du signal chuchote et utilisees dans l’acces lexical. Via une tâche d’identification en perception categorielle, cette etude revele que la duree conditionne la perception du voisement des fricatives chuchotees : plus /ʃ/ est long, plus il est percu [-voise] ; plus /ʒ/ est bref, plus il est identifie [+voise]. Cet effet de duree est module par le trait sous-jacent de voisement et la position dans le (non)mot. La fricative [+voise] en position finale montre une frontiere perceptive particulierement decalee vers des durees beaucoup plus longues que les autres.

Difficiles a analyser acoustiquement, l'aerophonometrie permet d'etudier efficacement les phenomenes de nasalite par des mesures precises des phases temporelles d'ouverture/fermeture du port velo-pharynge et de la quantite d'air empruntant les voies oro-nasales. Ces informations sont essentielles dans la prise en charge clinique des insuffisances et fuites velaires. Or, avant d'evaluer la variabilite de la nasalite selon la pathologie, les mecanismes impliques peuvent etre tres differents selon l'origine regionale du locuteur et donc la phonologie de son parler. A ce titre, la production de voyelles nasales en francais meridional mettrait en evidence un patron specifique presentant une phase d'oralisation initiale et un appendice consonantique nasal terminal plus ou moins long, jusque-la peu decrit et analyse quantitativement (Demolin et Teston 1998 ; Clairet 2008). L'enjeu de ce travail est donc d'attester statistiquement de la systematicite de ce patron nasal meridional, dans l'objectif a plus long terme d'etudier comment il resiste aux troubles affectant le voile du palais. Ce travail s'inscrit egalement dans la construction d'un protocole de bilan clinique prenant en compte les specificites des varietes dialectales des patients.

We examined whether listeners use acoustic correlates of voicing to resolve lexical ambiguities created by whispered speech in which a key feature, the voicing, is missing. Three associative priming experiments were conducted. The results showed a priming effect with whispered primes that included an intervocalic voiceless consonant (/petal/ petal) when the visual targets (FLEUR flower) were presented at the offset of the primes. A priming effect emerged with whispered primes that included a voiced intervocalic consonant (/pedal/ pedal) when the delay between the offset of the primes and the visual targets (VELO bike) was increased by 50 ms. In none of the experiments, the voiced primes (/pedal/) facilitated the processing of the targets (FLEUR) associated with the voiceless primes (/petal/). Our results suggest that the acoustic correlates of voicing are used by listeners to recover the intended words. Nonetheless, the retrieval of the voiced feature is not immediate during whispered word recognition.

This paper is concerned with the phonetic realization of the voicing contrast by two Spanish speakers with surgery-related apraxia of speech and two matched control speakers. Specifically, it examines whether speakers with AOS, widely reported to have a deficit in laryngeal control, use nasal leak as a compensatory mechanism aimed at facilitating the initiation of voicing in word-initial stops. The results show that the two apraxic speakers produced prevoicing in /b d g/ in only one third of the cases (correctly identified as ‘voiced’). In these cases, however, they exhibited significantly longer prevoicing than control subjects, and this longer voiced portion was closely related to a longer nasal murmur. These results shed light on the compensation strategies used by apraxic subjects to achieve voicing. Differences in the intensity patterns of nasal and voiced stops indicate that apraxic speakers control the timing of velopharyngeal gesture, suggesting that apraxia is a selective impairment.

Meynadier & Dufour (2016) have studied how French listeners resolve voicing ambiguities in whispered speech. Visual targets were presented at the offset of auditory semantically-associated primes. A similar priming effect to that observed with modal primes was found only with whispered primes included a voiceless consonant (/petal/ t primed FLEUR). No priming effect was found with whispered primes included a voiced consonant (/pedal/ d), either on the target V LO /pedal/ or on the target FLEUR related to /petal/. Here, visual targets were presented 50 ms after the offset of primes. While priming effects were no longer observed with whispered voiceless primes (/petal/ FLEUR), a priming effect emerged with whispered voiced primes (/pedal/ V LO). Together, our results suggest that residual correlates of voicing present in whispered speech are exploited by listeners to recover the intended words. Nonetheless, they also showed that the reconstruction of the voiced feature is not immediate during whispered word recognition and requires a certain amount of time to be done.

This study focuses on the perception of the voicing feature in whispered words in French. A voiced consonant in whispered voice is produced without vibration of the vocal folds, i.e. the main property of the [+voiced] feature in this language. In French, some studies show that the [+voice] whispered obstruents retain some phonetic properties of their underlying identity, regarding acoustical traces related to their duration (Vercherand, 2010, Meynadier et Gaydina, 2013), to their intra-oral pressure (Meynadier, Gaydina 2013, Garnier et al. 2014, Meynadier 2015) or to their glottal area (Malecot et Peebles 1965, Crevier-Buchman et al. 2009, Meynadier 2015). However, even fewer studies teach us how the voicing contrast could be recognized by French. The few studies examining how French listeners perceive the voicing contrast in whispered speech have produced elliptical and contradictory results with not really comparable methods (Vercherand 2010, Fux 2012, Meynadier et al. 2013). Here, the perception of the voicing feature of whispered obstruent consonants is examined in two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. In Experiment 1 with visual targets presented at the offset of auditory primes, a priming effect of similar magnitude to that observed in modal voice is found only when the whispered prime includes a voiceless obstruent (e.g. [s] in dessert primes CHOCOLAT). No priming effect appears when the whispered prime includes a voiced obstruent (e.g. [z] in desert), neither on the target word SABLE (sand) semantically related to desert, nor on the target word CHOCOLAT semantically related to dessert. In Experiment 2 with visual targets presented 50 ms after the offset of auditory primes, primes with a whispered voiced obstruent facilitate the processing of their respective semantic associated target words (i.e. [z] in desert primes SABLE). Hence, our study shows that the reconstruction of the voiced feature is not immediate during whispered word recognition and requires a certain amount of time. During this time, the listen may extract the phonetic traces needed to recover the underlying voicing of whispered voiced obstruents.

Introduction: The objective was to study the behavior of the larynx during shouted voice production, when the larynx is exposed to extremely high subglottic pressure.Materials and methods: The study involved electroglottographic, acoustic, and aerodynamic analyses of shouts produced at maximum effort by three male participants.Results and discussion: Under a normal speaking voice, the voice sound pressure level (SPL) is proportional to the subglottic pressure. However, when the subglottic pressure reached high levels, the voice SPL reached a maximum value and then decreased as subglottic pressure increased further. Furthermore, the electroglottographic signal sometimes lost its periodicity during the shout, suggesting irregular vocal fold vibration.

OBJECTIVE AND HYPOTHESIS:Vocal effort in loud voice is produced with increased subglottal pressure during vowels and increased supraglottal pressure during consonants. In the paper, our main objective is to check whether it was supported by a parallel increase in the airflow resistance of the laryngeal articulator and of the supralaryngeal articulator, here the lips.STUDY DESIGN AND METHOD:For this comparison, our choice fell on the fricative consonants, as their production allows perfectly synchronous air pressure and airflow measurements. Also, the calculation of the real instantaneous aerodynamic resistance is possible with fricatives-as it is with vowels-whereas it is not possible with plosives. The present feasibility study on a healthy subject is based on direct subglottal and intraoral pressures and airflow measured for /f/ or /v/ and from the contiguous vowel produced in VCVCV nonsense words at different levels of intensity.RESULTS AND CONCLUSION:The results support that the airflow resistances at the lips and that at the larynx are quite parallel. The airflow resistance at the lips during labial fricative production could provide a good picture of the laryngeal resistance during the production of continuous speech. This suggests clinical applications using both noninvasive inferred measurements of subglottal pressure variation and direct noninferred airflow measurements from more natural speech production tasks.

The relation between phonetic properties and phonological features has been the object of many theoretical suggestions which attempt to link the acoustic signal and linguistic representations. Phonetic redundancy and covariation in phonological contrasts are central points in this questioning. A correlation between consonant durations and voicing has been widely documented across many languages. The durational redundancy or covariation in voicing is largely seen as supported by a physiological substratum, e.g. an aerodynamic constraint on vocal vibration making voiced obstruents shorter. However other work, for example on French, has shown that the difference in obstruent duration according to underlying voicing feature resists complete voice assimilation and total devoicing, as in whispered speech, arguing for linguistic conditioning. Here, the physiological vs. phonological conditioning of voicing-dependant durations of French obstruents was tested by comparing five normal and pathological phonations differing in the nature of the phonatory organ and source for voicing (see Figure 1): (i) MODal voice, i.e. periodic laryngeal phonation; (ii) WHIspered voice, i.e. non-periodic laryngeal phonation; (iii) TUCker voice due to a partial laryngectomy, i.e. non-periodic laryngeal phonation; (iv) ESOphageal voice due to a complete laryngectomy, i.e. non-periodic non-laryngeal phonation produced by an aerodynamic excitation of the esophagus; (v) Pseudo-WHIspered voice due to complete laryngectomy and no use of esophagus, i.e. non-periodic supralaryngeal voice produced by an aerodynamic excitation of only the vocal tract. Acoustical durations were measured from 6 pairs of voiced-voiceless obstruents, i.e. /b-p/, /t-d/, /k-g/ and /f-v/, /s-z/, /ʃ-ʒ/ in initial (for fricatives), medial and word-final positions of isolated lexical words read in random ordered lists (one repetition). Table 1 reports information about speakers and data for each phonation type. Statistical effect of Voicing (voiced vs. voiceless) was tested by three-way ANOVAs with Voicing, Articulation (stop vs. fricative) and Lexical Position as the fixed effects (Table 1). The statistical comparisons between MOD and other phonations were stated on Voicing and Phonation interaction in two-ways ANOVAs included only the data for the same obstruents in the same lexical position. Reported here as a pilot study: one P-WHI speaker was analysed but not statically compared with MOD; the other one was excluded because of its total unintelligibility. In all phonation types and word positions, the underlying voiced stops or fricatives are significantly shorter than the phonological voiceless obstruents. Table 1 shows that the voicing-dependant difference is significantly preserved regardless of phonatory organ and acoustical source type, as is confirmed by the absence of Voicing*Phonation interactions for every comparison with the MOD condition. To neutralize the speaking rate variation between speakers and conditions, mean ratio durations across speakers were calculated as the duration difference, i.e. voiceless consonant duration minus voiced consonant duration, divided by the voiceless consonant duration. Figure 1 shows a gradual reduction increasing with the distance from the production mechanism of modal voice used by healthy subjects. However any clear boundary seems match the change of the phonatory organ (laryngeal vs. non laryngeal) or of the phonatory source (periodic vs. non-periodic). Moreover, although phonetically reduced, the ratio of durational differences of the underlying voicing contrast remains fairly large (around 0.3). The physiological conditioning therefore seems to have only a limited effect, since the duration contrast overcomes the various physical constraints of the different phonatory mechanisms. The resistance of voicing-dependant durations to laryngectomies argues for an encoding of the systematic phonetic information at a phonological level and/or for a phonetic knowledge component in the grammar.