SyllabO+: A new tool to study sublexical phenomena in spoken Quebec French

Abstract

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.

Age-related deficits in speech production: From phonological planning to motor implementation

“…TDH also proposes that connection strength is augmented by usage, and therefore that less frequently used phonological forms are more vulnerable to an age-related disruption. We propose here that disruption in phonological encoding mechanisms during language production in aging is related to the increase rate in simplification errors that we observed here, in complex syllables, which are less frequent in the French language than are simple syllables (Bédard, Audet, Drouin, Roy, Rivard, & Tremblay, 2016), making them particularly vulnerable to a disruption in connection strength, consistent with TDH.…”

Aging of speech production, from articulatory accuracy to motor timing.

“…Nonwords are meaningless sequences of syllables that are used to obtain a measure of speech production that is considered largely independent of wordlevel lexical and semantic processes. The nonwords were selected from SyllabO+ (http://speechneurolab.ca/en/syllabo), a database of over 360,000 spoken syllables based on a corpus of 225 speakers of Québec French recorded in natural communication contexts (Bedard, Audet, Drouin, Roy, Rivard, & Tremblay, 2016).…”

Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database

“…Phonological syllable measures The phonological syllable attributes and statistics provided in P-PAL include the number of phonological syllables in the word (fon_syl_num) (e.g., in its spoken form casa has two phonological syllables), the phonological syllabification of the word according to the standard accent in EP (fon_syl_div) (e.g., the phonological syllabification of casa is ['ka.z ]), the phonological CV structure of the word (fon_syl_cv) (e.g., the phonological syllable structure of casa is CV.CV), and the stress pattern of the word, using 1 for the position in which the syllable is stressed and 0 for the unstressed syllable positions (fon_syl_acc) (e.g., the stress pattern of casa is B1.0,^indicating that the first syllable is the stressed one). Besides these attributes, P-PAL also offers, in line with the syllabic information provided in recent databases (e.g., Bédard et al, 2017;Chetail & Mathey, 2010;Davis, 2005;Davis & Perea, 2005;Duchon et al, 2013;Duñabeitia et al, 2010;Kyparissiadis et al, 2017;New & Spinelli, 2013), several statistics regarding the number of words sharing the same phonological syllable structure as the stimulus (fon_syl_cv_tp) (see Fig. 9), as well as their summed (fon_syl_cv_tk) and mean (fon_syl_cv_tk) word frequencies, thus mimicking the statistics provided in the orthographic syllable subfield.…”

“…They include a broad range of phonological attributes and lexical and sublexical statistics of different (decreasing) grain sizes (for the spoken word as a whole and for phonological syllables, biphones, and phones; see Fig. 7), in line with the phonological metrics available in other databases (e.g., Balota et al, 2007;Bédard et al, 2017;Chetail & Mathey, 2010;Davis, 2005;Davis & Perea, 2005;Duchon et al, 2013;Hofmann et al, 2007;Kyparissiadis et al, 2017;New et al, 2004;New & Spinelli, 2013). Note that the phonological information provided in P-PAL results from the phonetic transcription of all its lexical entries using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and from the computation of the different phonological statistics on the basis of the distributions observed in the lemma and word form corpus previously described (see the Corpus Sampling section), from which the orthographic statistics were also obtained.…”

“…Moreover, in line with the syllabic information provided in recent databases (e.g., Bédard et al, 2017;Chetail & Mathey, 2010;Davis, 2005;Davis & Perea, 2005;Duchon et al, 2013;Duñabeitia et al, 2010;Kyparissiadis et al, 2017), P-PAL also allows researchers to obtain several type and token positional syllable statistics. Specifically, it is possible to obtain the number (ort_syl_cv_tp), the summed word frequency (ort_syl_cv_tk), and the mean word frequency (ort_syl_cv_tk) of the words sharing the same syllable structure with the stimulus, as well as the number (ort_syl_p_tp), the mean (ort_syl_p_tp_med), the summed word frequency ( o r t _ s y l _ p _ t k ) , a n d t h e m e a n w o r d f r e q u e n c y (ort_syl_p_tk_med) of the words with the same number of syllables sharing the same syllables in the same positions.…”