A Multi-Measurement Approach to the Identification of the Audiovisual Facial Correlates of Contrastive Focus in French

Résumé En

The aims of this study are twofold. We first seek to validate a previous study conducted on one speaker. It identified lower face visible articulatory correlates of contrastive focus in French for real (non-reiterant) speech. We thus conducted the same study for another speaker. Our second goal was to enlarge the set of cues measured to other facial movements. To do so we used a complementary measurement technique (Optotrak) on the same corpus. The articulatory measurements showed that there was a set of consistent visible articulatory correlates of contrastive focus in French across speakers: a) an increase in lip area and jaw opening on the focused item b) a lengthening of the focal syllables c) a post-focal hypo-articulation. However, there are also some speaker specific strategies. The first speaker showed an anticipation strategy but the second speaker did not. The Optotrak measurements confirmed that: a) focus corresponded to an increase in lip height and/or in lip width b) the post-focal sequence was hypo-articulated. We also found that: a) the focused item was often correlated with a slight head movement (nod) b) facial movements such as cheek movements were amplified when there was focus and c) eyebrow movements were not correlated with focus.