Despite the huge importance of spoken language production in everyday life, little is known about the manner and extent to which the motor aspects of speech production evolve with advancing age as well as the nature of the underlying senescence mechanisms. In this crosssectional group study, we examined the relationship between age and speech production performance using a non-lexical speech production task in which spoken syllable frequency and phonological complexity were systematically varied to test hypotheses about underlying mechanisms. A non-probabilistic sample of 60 cognitively healthy adults (18 -83 years) produced meaningless nonwords aloud as quickly and accurately as possible. Error rate, vocal reaction time, vocal reaction time variability, vocal response duration and vocal response duration variability were used as dependent variables to characterize speech production performance. The results showed an overall increase in error rate, which occurred mainly in the final syllable position (coda). There was also an increase in vocal response duration and induration variability with age, which was moderated by phonological complexity and syllable frequency. Finally, we also found an age-related change in the relationship between vocal reaction time and vocal response duration. Together, these findings were interpreted as reflecting an age-related decline in the planning and execution of speech movements in cognitively healthy adults.

Sublexical phonotactic regularities in language have a major impact on language development, as well as on speech processing and production throughout the entire lifespan. To understand the impact of phonotactic regularities on speech and language functions at the behavioral and neural levels, it is essential to have access to oral language corpora to study these complex phenomena in different languages. Yet, probably because of their complexity, oral language corpora remain less common than written language corpora. This article presents the first corpus and database of spoken Quebec French syllables and phones: SyllabO+. This corpus contains phonetic transcriptions of over 300,000 syllables (over 690,000 phones) extracted from recordings of 184 healthy adult native Quebec French speakers, ranging in age from 20 to 97 years. To ensure the representativeness of the corpus, these recordings were made in both formal and familiar communication contexts. Phonotactic distributional statistics (e.g., syllable and co-occurrence frequencies, percentages, percentile ranks, transition probabilities, and pointwise mutual information) were computed from the corpus. An open-access online application to search the database was developed, and is available at www.speechneurolab.ca/syllabo. In this article, we present a brief overview of the corpus, as well as the syllable and phone databases, and we discuss their practical applications in various fields of research, including cognitive neuroscience, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, experimental psychology, phonetics, and phonology. Nonacademic practical applications are also discussed, including uses in speech-language pathology.

À partir d’une enquête sociologique sur les conditions de pratique et le statut social des artistes en arts visuels aujourd’hui, l’article présente une réflexion sur le concept d’ethos, sur lequel s’est particulièrement orientée cette recherche. L’objectif est ici de montrer comment, par-delà son ancienneté, cette notion d’ethos semble encore aujourd’hui pertinente, particulièrement en regard de son potentiel analytique à lier l’étude des pratiques et celle des valeurs, dans une considération conjuguée de la liberté d’un sujet individuel et de son rattachement à des représentations socialement constituées. Il s’agit aussi de donner un aperçu du potentiel heuristique du concept d’ethos dans le contexte d’une enquête sociologique de terrain où il se trouve opérationnalisé, en l’occurrence celle que j’ai menée entre 2008 et 2013 sur les artistes en arts visuels au Québec et en Belgique francophone.From a sociological research on today’s working conditions and social status of artists in visual arts, this article presents a reflection on the Ethos concept in sociology. Beyond its long history, this concept still seems relevant nowadays, specifically for its analytical potential to link the study of practices and values, to conjugate individual subjectivity with common culture in the age of normative plurality. The article proposes secondly an overview of the heuristic potential of the concept of Ethos in the context of a sociological survey - inspired by ethnography in this case - that I conducted between 2008 and 2013 about visual artists who evolve in the Province of Quebec and in French speaking Belgium.A partir de una encuesta sociológica sobre las condiciones de práctica y del status social de los artistas en artes visuales de hoy en día, el artículo presenta una reflexión sobre el concepto de ethos, sobre el cual está particularmente orientado esta investigación. Aquí, el objetivo es mostrar cómo, más allá de su antigüedad, esta noción de ethos parece hoy en día aún más pertinente, particularmente al tener en cuenta su potencial analítico ligado al estudio de sus prácticas y de sus valores, dentro de una consideración que conjuga la libertad del sujeto individual y su correlación con las representaciones socialmente constituidas. Se trata también de dar una visión de conjunto sobre el potencial heurístico del concepto ethos dentro del contexto de una encuesta sociológica, en el terreno donde se encuentra operacionalizada y en coincidencia con la investigación que yo conduje entre 2008 y 2013 sobre los artistas en artes visuales en Quebec y en la Bélgica francófona

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