The aid of prosodic emphasis for distributional learning of vowel categories in 
French

Roete, Ingeborg; Cristia, Alejandrina; Versteegh, M.

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The aid of prosodic emphasis for distributional learning of vowel categories in French

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Roete, Ingeborg
International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
LSCP;

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Citation

Roete, I., Cristia, A., & Versteegh, M. (2014). The aid of prosodic emphasis for distributional learning of vowel categories in French. Talk presented at the Workshop for Young Researchers at ENS and LLING. Paris, France. 2014-10-28.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0003-5205-B

Abstract

It has been shown that for English the automatic classification of vowels into categories is
aided by using tokens with prosodic emphasis (Adriaanse & Swingley, 2012). This study investigates whether the findings also hold in French. Using a corpus of conversational French speech, prosodically prominent vowels were automatically extracted. Using Gaussian mixture models to represent the vowel categories, two models were trained; one
on the prominent vowels and one on all vowels. The results of the clustering show that the
model trained only on the prominent vowels performs better than the model trained on all
vowels. This suggests that infants learning the sounds of their first language will have an
easier task if they pay attention to only the stressed vowels.