A multi-measurement approach to the identification of the audiovisual facial correlates of contrastive focus in French

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 (nonreiterant) 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 postfocal 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.