Etude du phénomène de convergence phonétique : comparaison enfants adultes

Study of the phonetic convergence phenomenon: a comparison between children and adults. Phonetic convergence is defined as the tendency, for speakers in an interaction, to change the characteristics of their speech production in order to match their interlocutor’s, or to match a vocal technological device. This phenomenon hasn’t been studied extensively with children and faces two competing hypotheses in this population: children should either be more convergent or less convergent than adults. This exploratory study focuses on phonetic convergence, by comparing dyads of children to dyads of adults. 36 participants (20 adults and 16 children aged 10-11) produced the 75 sentences of the corpus within 5 successive (4 individual and one duo game) experimental conditions. The pitch and the mean speech rate have been evaluated. The outcome of this study shows that the two groups were convergent for the individual conditions, but for different acoustic measures. During the game condition, phonetic convergence has been found in the two groups with, however, an important inter-individual variability, in particular in terms of a temporal dynamic. MOTS-CLÉS : convergence phonétique, adaptation communicative, production, enfants