PAC programme

PAC 2025 - Spoken English varieties: Perception and representations

Hugo Chatellier — 2025-05-26T12:23:34Z

The 17th edition of the PAC international conference entitled "Spoken English varieties: perception and representations" will be held at Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence, June 18-20 2025. It will focus on perception and representations of spoken English varieties, both native and non-native, from a phonetic and phonological point of view. People working in the framework of the PAC programme are used to following a field approach, which is production-oriented. We would like to broaden our perspective by using our data to test perception and representations. The idea is to open the conference to researchers specialized in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics as applied to phonetics and phonology.
The conference will be organized around three days of plenary talks, thematic sessions and workshops focusing on the issues detailed in the conference program.

PAC 2023 - Spoken English varieties : interfaces and multidimensional approaches

Hugo Chatellier — 2023-04-12T08:17:00Z

The 16th edition of the PAC international conference entitled "Spoken English varieties: interfaces and multidimensional approaches" will be held at University Paris Nanterre, April 12-14 2023. It will focus on interfaces between phonology and phonetics as well as other levels of linguistic structure in contemporary spoken English varieties on the basis of corpus data. Multidimensional approaches to oral corpora are understood as approaches combining different levels of linguistic analysis and/or tools and methods borrowed from other disciplines (such as sociology, geography, anthropology, computer science, stylistics, psychology, neuro and cognitive sciences, media studies, cultural studies).
The conference will be organized around three days of plenary and thematic sessions focusing on the issues detailed in the conference program.
We hope to see you in Nanterre!

PAC 2021 - Spoken English varieties: redefining and representing realities, communities and norms

Hugo Chatellier — 2020-05-27T12:41:54Z

The 15th PAC international conference, entitled "Spoken English varieties: redefining and representing realities, communities and norms", will take place at University Toulouse - Jean Jaurès on September 1-3 2021. Here is the call for papers. The final deadline for the submission of abstracts has been extended to April 30, 2021.

Transcription conventions

Hugo Chatellier — 2019-04-20T16:20:36Z

SOT and turn-taking

There are important basic conventions established within the programme in order to achieve uniform transcriptions. Researchers should abide by these conventions in order to guarantee the comparability of the data.

PAC researchers transcribe under Praat, using standard orthography. Each speaker receives their own tier which is named after their initials (eg. JC1_SOT).
Interval boundaries are added according to the logic of turn-taking (a new interval for each new turn or for backchanneling - typically fillers such as "yeah, really, oh" and laughter, vocal or other noises uttered by the speaker/listener).

However, if stretches within boundaries are too long, a true phonemic/phonetic alignment may prove difficult at a later stage. We therefore request that interval units should not normally exceed 15 seconds. No carriage returns are used under Praat.

Simplified punctuation

The punctuation system is simplified: the full stop, the comma, and the question mark are the only symbols from traditional spelling used for the transcription of discourse in the project.

Commas indicate a brief pause in the discourse, or a ‘non-final', ‘continuing' intonation contour marked by a shift in pitch or other cues.
I don't know what to do with it, I mean I've never looked at a language that way, which is sort of going out and not knowing anything.

Full stops stand for a relatively long pause in the discourse, or for a ‘final' intonation contour.
So I was home. I won the airline tickets.

A question mark is inserted at the end of a question.
How many of these are you going to have?

NB:
– Pauses and intonation contours do not always coincide with expectations based on written syntax.
– Pauses and intonation units are not distinguished along rigorous lines in the orthography employed here: such a finer supra-segmental transcription remains an optional subsequent task.
– Commas are used between repeated words or expressions.
– An exceptionally long pause in an otherwise logically/syntactically coherent sequence will be indicated by a parenthetical comment in between {}.

Truncation of words

A dash (followed by a space) indicates unfinished words:

You think you have this demo- democratic freedom but it's, not really there.
The col- the faculty are looking for a good fit.

Truncated intonation units (when speakers do not finish their train of thought, are interrupted, or hesitate, etc.) are marked by a comma or a full stop:

you know I am an American but, I don't, I'm not like, §yeah I'm an American§ you know.

Repetition

Repeated words or expressions are separated by a comma.

I, I like to go skiing in the snow, but I don't want to have to dig my way out of it every day.
I think it's true that, that, there is racism in, racism in, in California but it's really well-hidden.

NB: Commas mark repetition and short pauses in the discourse. Thus, in the following example, the first comma stands for a short pause, the second for a repetition, the third indicates a repetition that coincides with a short pause at the same time, and the fourth one marks a short pause:

Uh, it's okay it's you know it's, it's really, it's really weird teaching you know, I don't know.

Parentheses

Observations made by the transcriber on non-linguistic aspects of the interaction (noises, stammering, etc.) and on the recording (background action, quality problems) are placed between curly brackets {}.

Laughter may also be indicated with the symbol @, or by @@ on both sides of the segment concerned:

That's at the beginning of the week so it's hard to remember. @ Uh, we read a couple of theoretical texts comparing irony to allegory,

It's @@ impossible @@ !

Unintelligible words are indicated by the capital letter X in parentheses, preceded by a *. The number of Xs inserted (ideally) corresponds to the number of incomprehensible syllables:

because not *(XX) all the cases are uh, show up in the pronoun system,

In cases where the transcriber thinks s/he has probably recognized a word (or sequence of words) but is not fully sure, the word is put in parentheses:

Maybe I'll stay in the technology sector, and uh hopefully do something with creativity, like maybe product design, or writing you know (maybe) marketing oriented, something like that. (laughter)

Reported Speech

Reported speech is transcribed between §:

And then when Bush said §read my lips no new taxes§ and then, you know,
And there was a woman at the other line and she said, §oh no message§, and so I was
and she said I had won the prize and I said §didn't you just call§

Some features of spoken English in relation to spelling

Obviously, many reductions and contractions occur in spontaneous speech. Contracted forms are used in our transcriptions only in so far as they are allowed in standard spelling. Note, in the following example, the co-occurrence of a non-contracted and a contracted form, the former bearing a slight emphasis.

Yeah I have heard that and also I've heard that he seems to be very needy of getting votes.

Sometimes non-contracted forms appear in a more formal style:

And were your parents from there?
My mom has lived in Los Angeles all her life.

Word internal ellipsis is an equally frequent feature of spoken English. To avoid a waste of energy at the initial stage of transcription, such deletions are not transcribed. The examination of these features is left to the phonological/phonetic stage of the analysis.

Some very, very intelligent young people, will apply but not do well here because they needed more structure. (and not ‘cause)
a portfolio for music, you know original music compositions (and not ‘riginal)

But note that we do not reintroduce words (or word sequences) which appear to have been missed out (in relation to normative - written - grammar). Thus if what we hear is:

Was she there?
Think so.

We do not transcribe:

Was she there?
I think so.

Realizations for which standard orthography offers distinctions will be transcribed accordingly. Thus the distinction between "yes" and "yeah" is systematically respected in the transcription:

I don't know. Yeah.
It's confusing.
It's confusing. @ Yes there, there's a lot involved and I think, to be, to say a real opinion on it you have, I have to be, really informed.
But do you feel now you're from California?
Yes.
That you're Californian?
Yes. I guess. @

Interjections are another characteristic feature of conversations, employed to express pain, surprise ('ouch', 'oops') etc., or simply to provide backchanneling (uh huh, oh, ah, hm). For these speech forms, we use the conventions put forward in the OED.

Most often, however, the speaker is simply using a filler to buy time while thinking, hesitating, or searching for an expression (hm, uhm, uh, er) etc. Regardless of the actual sound pronounced, this type of intervention will always be transcribed as ‘er' for British, and ‘uh' for American speech.

Er, it's, it's, er, yeah, it was quite a nice place er, *(XX) smelly in some places, the *(XX) particularly, er it's very run down and er
Uh, let's see, uh, I uh, I'm from L.A. and I let's say I've been moved uh always to magnet schools which are like schools that kind of specialize in one thing or another

Acronyms

Acronyms – pronounceable words made up from the initial letters of a multi-word name like, for example, UNESCO for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization – are written in the usual way: capital letters with no separation of any kind if the word is pronounced as a unit. If on the other hand it is spelled out letter by letter, this is indicated by typing an underscore after each letter of the word: U_N_E_S_C_O.

Any unexpected form of actual pronunciation will be indicated in between square brackets after the word in X-SAMPA transcription. X-SAMPA is an extension of SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet), a machine-readable phonetic alphabet developed by speech researchers from many different countries in the late eighties. It is to date the best international collaborative basis for a standard machine-readable encoding of phonetic notation mapping the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet onto ASCII codes. As with the ordinary IPA, a string of X-SAMPA symbols does not require spaces between successive symbols.

Dialectal expressions

Words or expressions that do not belong to either standard British or American English will be transcribed by using X-SAMPA symbols:

And, how, is he [tSEr]/, he'll be [tSEr\dZ n2]?

However, if there is a longer stretch of discourse in dialectal speech, "normal" spelling will be employed.

And, how, is he cher/, he'll be cherged noo?

If there is a reference dictionary of the dialect being described, its conventions should be used.

Reference orthographic systems

In our transcriptions, we apply the spelling system normally used in the country where the speakers live or come from. Thus, if we transcribe British varieties of English, we use standard British English conventions (adopted in the OED). If we transcribe American English, we use the conventions adopted in Webster's. Below is an example transcribed according to the British and the American conventions (respectively):

Standard British English:

he can't honour the guidelines of the debate, for even ninety minutes
when I was, I think, maybe thirteen, just travelling with my mum, and er

American English:

he can't honor the guidelines of the debate, for even ninety minutes
when I was, I think, maybe thirteen, just traveling with my mom, and uh

Anonymization

Proper names and other information allowing for the direct identification of speakers should appear in between $ so as to facilitate the process of anonymization at a later stage, which can be achieved thanks to a specific Praat script.

Common protocol

Sylvain Navarro — 2019-04-20T16:18:57Z

The common PAC protocol provides access to various speech styles, on a continuum from spontaneous/informal to monitored/formal for each speaker, by recording the following tasks:
– reading of two wordlists
– reading of a list of sentences
– reading of a text
– formal (semi-guided) interview
– informal conversation

Wordlists

The two wordlists in the PAC protocol include 192 items altogether and focus on segmental phenomena. The first wordlist tests the vowel system by notably presenting potential minimal pairs in a randomized order. The second wordlist does the same for the consonant system. Both lists allow for the study of rhoticity, vowel length, and the realization of /t/ (tapping, glottaling), among other phenomena. For more information on the relevance of the wordlists with regards to the programme's ambitions, see Brulard et al. (2015) and Carr et al. (2004).

Researchers in the different thematic groups are likely to add extra reading tasks to focus on more regionally specific phenomena. For further information, check the thematic research pages.

Sentences

The list of sentences includes 34 items reflecting a variety of syntactic structures. Within a given survey point, the order of the sentences should be randomized for each informant, in order to avoid repetitive intonation contours which sometimes occur over the first few items (see Bongiorno et al. to appear).

Text

The text is entitled "A Christmas interview". It is a two-page-long passage originally adapted from a newspaper article but substantially modified to hide its source and include a number of phonological and phonetic phenomena worth investigating, and notably post-lexical processes such as r-sandhi and assimilations.

Before the recording, informants may take a few minutes to read the text to themselves. This gives them a chance to run through the text and know what it is about, and thus be more at ease and perform better for the recording. This is important in order to guarantee the necessary fluidity for the study of connected speech processes.

Formal conversation

For both the formal and the informal conversations, we recommend that the first few minutes of recording be avoided for subsequent analysis as the informants often need a few minutes to be completely at ease with the task.

The formal (semi-guided) interview involves the fieldworker and the informant. It is based on the information sheet which establishes the sociolinguistic profile of each informant, and on the PAC-LVTI questionnaire which gathers information about the speaker's language, identity, work, and relationship to the area they live in.

Informal conversation

The informal conversation is recorded with two or three informants in the absence of the fieldworker. There are no topics or directions imposed on the conversation as its main goal is to provide access to the most spontaneous and casual speech style possible.

All in all, about 30 minutes of spontaneous speech should be recorded for each informant (at least 15 minutes of formal interview and 15 minutes of informal conversation) – a sufficient basis for the subsequent annotation and analysis of each speech style for each speaker, as required by the programme standards.

Information sheet

In order to build a comprehensive comparable database of speaker profiles, the PAC methodology requires for the fieldworker to enquire about the following:
– age
– gender
– place of birth
– place of residence
– family and ancestry
– occupation
– education
– leisure activities
among other personal information

LVTI sociolinguistic questionnaire

The PAC-LVTI sociolinguistic questionnaire includes questions about language, urban/post-urban environments, work, and identity which, along with the Information sheet, are used as a thematic basis for the formal/semi-guided interview.

Tools

Below are links to some of the tools we use within the PAC programme:

– Praat (Paul Boersma & David Weenink (2023): Praat: doing phonetics by computer)

– Phonometrica (Eychenne, Julien & Léa Courdès-Murphy (2019). Phonometrica: an open platform for the analysis of speech corpora. Proceedings of the Seoul International Conference on Speech Sciences 2019, Seoul National University, pp. 107-108.)

– SPPAS (Brigitte Bigi (2015). SPPAS - Multi-lingual Approaches to the Automatic Annotation of Speech. In "the Phonetician" - International Society of Phonetic Sciences, ISSN 0741-6164, Number 111-112 / 2015-I-II, pages 54-69.)

If you are interested in using the copyrighted PAC protocol for your fieldwork, feel free to contact us to enquire about PAC membership.

Follow us on Twitter!

Cécile VIOLLAIN — 2019-04-20T14:55:14Z

You can now follow us on Twitter @pacprogramme for news, events, pictures and more...

Collective publication with EUP

Cécile VIOLLAIN — 2019-04-20T12:36:00Z

The collective volume, New Perspectives on English Word Stress, edited by Eiji Yamada et al., has been published by Edinburgh University Press in June 2023. It materializes the many exchanges that took place during the PAC international conference entitled “Variation, change and spoken corpora: advances in the phonology and phonetics of contemporary English” at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France in 2015.

- News

PAC 2019 - Phonetic and phonological variation in contemporary English: Xperience-Xperimentation

Cécile VIOLLAIN — 2018-12-19T12:05:49Z

Our 2019 conference Phonetic and phonological variation in contemporary English: Xperience-Xperimentation will take place in Aix-en-Provence from Tuesday June 4 to Wednesday June 5 2019.

International conference

Guest Speakers:
Emmanuel Ferragne, Université de Paris
Dominic Watt, University of York

The conference programme is available here.

For more information, visit https://pacaix2019.sciencesconf.org

PAC-ToE

Hugo Chatellier — 2018-12-19T11:55:23Z

PAC-Teaching of English, launched in 2011, is coordinated by Anne Przewozny-Desriaux, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès. The project aims at linking theoretical and methodological research interests with pedagogical commitments and didactic implementations in the field of spoken English Teaching & Learning (English for General and Specific Purposes, BA and Master levels; Primary and secondary sectors of education; secondary education competitive examination training).

PICL!

Among the PAC-ToE research projects is the Phonologie Incarnée de l'anglais au Collège Labitrie (PICL!). The PICL! Project was triggered by a twofold line of thought: it falls within the scope of applied and situated research for both teachers and learners. It also stems from cognitive (embodied) theoretical traditions in linguistics and psychology. PICL! is a longitudinal investigation in a French secondary school (2019-2023). On the basis of a 120-pupil spoken corpus, we explore the measurement of French non-native learners' production and perception in spoken English (interphonological scale), the assessment of self-efficacy, motivation in phonetic performance, as well as the conception of educational modules.

Members:
Cécile Baron, Académie de Toulouse (Collège Labitrie, Tournefeuille)
Murièle Barou, Académie de Toulouse (Collège Labitrie, Tournefeuille)
Nathalie Huet, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Amélie Josselin-Leray, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Anne Przewozny-Desriaux, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès
Julie Rouaud, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
Marie-Pierre Triviaux, INSPE Toulouse Occitanie-Pyrénées et Académie de Toulouse (Lycée Lapérouse, Albi)
Marie-Héléna Younan, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès

Doctoral students:
Victoria O'Callaghan, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès

PAC-Prosody

Cécile VIOLLAIN — 2018-12-19T11:55:16Z

PAC-Prosody (Aix-Marseille Université) is coordinated by Sophie Herment, Aix-Marseille Université. The project, launched in 2013, is dedicated to the study of the rhythm and intonation of the varieties of English, at the interface with acoustics and syntax, and is designing tools for the semi-automatic annotation of prosody.

Methodology
The core protocol for the PAC-Prosody surveys is the PAC-LVTI one.
Additional tasks for the study of prosody have been conceived and constitute the PAC Prosody extension (which comes in addition to the original protocol):
– a list of sentences to be read (declaratives, questions, emphasis and enumerations)
– a map-task (specifically created for each survey location)
– an image described by the speaker

If you are interested in using the copyrighted PAC protocol and its Prosody extension for your fieldwork, feel free to contact us to enquire about PAC membership.

Members:
Julia Bongiorno, Aix-Marseille Université
Caroline Bouzon, Université de Lille
Sophie Herment, Aix-Marseille Université
Airelle Théveniaut, Université de Bretagne Sud
Anne Tortel, Aix-Marseille Université
Gabor Turcsan, Aix-Marseille Université
Stephan Wilhelm, Université Grenoble Alpes

Doctoral students:
Raphaëlle Magnin, Aix-Marseille Université
Marine Mouquet, Aix-Marseille Université
Aïcha Rahal, Aix-Marseille Université