Foreign and regional accents in French. Characterisation and identification

This research focuses on the identification and characterisation of accents in French. For both foreign and regional accents, we started with perceptual identification experiments, we measured phonetic features which may characterise these accents using automatic phoneme alignment, and we ranked the most discriminating features by using classification techniques. The following features are perceivable and happen to be quite robust for automatic identification: devoicing of voiced stop consonants, shift of /e/ toward [i], /b/~/v/ and /s/~/z/ confusions, “rolled r”, schwa fronting or raising for German, English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese accents in French; /O/ fronting in the North of France, schwa pronunciation and denasalised nasal vowels in the South, for regional French accents. MOTS-CLÉS : accents, identification perceptive et automatique, alignement en phonèmes, classification, analyse de données.