During verbal communication individuals tend to align at different linguistic levels. Similarly, playing music requires fine temporal alignment and coordination abilities, in order to anticipate and adapt to other’s actions in real time. The aim of the project is to study the effect of musical rhythm on interpersonal verbal coordination in adults, children and children with hearing impairment. We will first quantify with behavioral and neural measures the interpersonal coordination during verbal exchanges. Then, we will test to what extent and how music training modifies these coordination metrics. The originality of the project lies in the use of a multilevel approach to conversation, front edge analysis techniques on speech and neural data. Importantly, this is the first attempt to study the effect of rhythmic joint-action (music) on different levels of language coordination in hearing impaired children.

The project is dedicated to the study of two Modern Southarabian languages (MSAL) spoken in Oman: Omani Mehri and Jibbali. This topic is motivated as follows: i) these languages are endangered: spoken by minorities, no official status, under the pressure of Arabic, ii) they are understudied in the field of Semitic studies. In addition to the evident need to gather data on these languages, the task is thus urgent. The participating institutions will not only profit from the project's scientific merits, but also contribute to safeguarding this part of the human linguistic heritage. We pursue an old tradition in MSAL going back to the French consul F. Fresnel, who, in 1837, introduced MSAL to the scientific community. The project has two main objectives: 1. Documentation : update and increase the database on Omani Mehri, and on Jibbali ; constitution of an electronic corpus accessible to the scientific community 2. Linguistic analysis focussing on 4 issues : Phonetics and phonology of the larynx ; morphological structure of the verbal system ; determiners and modifiers in the nominal phrase ; dialectology and comparative Semitic linguistics. These issues were selected, because they a) are presently understudied, b) raise important questions for linguistic theory, c) constitute a common interest in the research team. The study of glottal activity will contribute to the understanding of the phonology and phonetics of MSAL, and will be relevant to general phonetics as well. Particular attention will be paid to ejectives (which combine ejectivity, pharyngealization, creaky voice, voicing, and change of place of articulation) and to the voiceless non-ejectives, whose phonological properties are intriguing. On the basis of new elicitated verbal paradigms of Omani Mehri, we will uncover the mechanisms underlying two intriguing properties of the verb system : the absence of Forms II and III, and the mobility of the thematic vowel. An explanation of these two properties will prove crucial for the understanding of the overall organization of the verbal system of the language, and beyond, of the status of templates in grammar. Nominal determiners and the Construct State remain ill understood in Mehri and Jibbali. The definite article is absent in Yemeni Mehri, and it surfaces in various different forms in the Omani dialects that have one. It exists in Jibbali, but its surface realizations are complex. Our task consists in the clarification of its phonetic realization, its phonological representation, and its syntactic status. These three issues are tightly related: understanding the phonetic reality and phonological effects of glottal activity is a necessary condition for the morpho-phonological and syntactic study of verbal prefixes and determiners. Finally, the systematic study of dialectal variation in MSAL will contribute to the debate in comparative Semitic linguistics at three levels: structure of MSAL, South-Semitic, and Semitic. The project counts on a team of specialists working on MSAL in France, and on eminent international scholars specialized in Semitic and Afroasiatic languages. It covers the main linguistic domains beyond the boundaries of theoretical frameworks, and it strives at establishing an internationally visible, active, and innovative network of scholars working on MSAL. In addition to regular presentations at international specialist conferences, publications in peer-reviewed journals, and the organization of conferences and workshops, the project will deliver the following - an electronic corpus of linguistic data of Mehri and Jibbali - a monograph about the verbal system of Mehri - a special issue of Arabian Humanities on the importance of MSAL to comparative Semitic studies.

The objective is to create a complete three-dimensional digital talking head including the vocal tract from the vocal folds to the lips, the face and integrating the digital simulation of aeroacoustic phenomena. Our project is particularly aimed at learning articulatory gestures from corpora of data from the vocal tract (real-time MRI), the face (motion capture) and subglottic pressure, highlighting latent articulatory variables that are relevant from the point of view of speech production control, and aeroacoustic simulations that allow exploring speech production and learning control of a replica simulating the vocal tract. The project will make extensive use of deep learning techniques in interaction with physical simulations, which is an important innovation. The consortium is made up of 4 remarkably complementary research teams with internationally leading theoretical and practical experience in the fields of AI (particularly deep learning techniques in automatic speech processing), acoustics, experimental phonetics, MRI imaging and automatic speech processing. The project is organized into 5 main tasks: 1) acquisition of a corpus of data covering 3 hours of speech (with several expressions) for one male and one female speaker (plus two speakers with less complete data) for dynamic MRI, facial deformation and subglottic pressure data. 2) corpus pre-processing to track the contour of articulators in MRI films, align modalities, denoise speech data, and reconstruct the vocal tract in 3D from dynamic 2D data and static 3D MRI data. 3) development of the control of the temporal evolution of the vocal tract shape, the face and the glottis opening based on the sequence of phonemes to be articulated and supra-segmental information. The approach will be based on in-depth learning using the corpus of the project and will aim in particular to bring out latent variables allowing the speaking head to be controlled and expressions to be rendered. 4) learning how to control a physical model of the simplified vocal tract using a large number of measurements. Deep learning will allow the development production strategies for plosives involving phenomena that are too rapid to be imaged with sufficient precision. 5) Adaptation of the talking head to other speakers based on anatomical landmarks and study of the acoustic impact of articulatory perturbation using the talking head. The talking head will generate the temporal evolution of the complete shape of the vocal tract and face and the signal produced by acoustic simulation from a sentence to be pronounced. It will also be possible to produce the audio-visual signal without the acoustic simulation but losing the possibility of introducing perturbations into production and thus to study in depth the production of speech which is the main interest of this project. The first result is the development of a radically new approach to the modelling of speech production. Until now, production models, and in particular those used for articulatory synthesis, exploit numerical models whose formal framework limits the possibility of accounting for real data such as real-time MRI. The fields of application concern the exploitation of dynamic MRI data, the diagnosis of speech pathologies, real-time feedback inside the MRI machine, the rehabilitation of articulation gestures, the deployment of realistic talking heads for the entire vocal tract and the improvement of the rendering of lips in talking heads.

Dynamic translaryngeal ultrasound (dTLUS), a non-invasive and inexpensive technique, has emerged in recent years as an alternative to nasofibroscopy, a minimally invasive method to assess vocal cord paralysis. This paralysis is the major risk (occurrence of 3 to 5%) associated with cervical surgery (100 000 procedures per year in France). The first works of our consortium have shown the performances of dTLUS after thyroid or parathyroid surgery, to diagnose early the paralysis of one of the vocal cords. The objective of VOCALISE is to propose a new approach allowing a better characterization of postoperative or radiation-induced dysphonia. It consists in associating to the dTLUS optimized acquisitions of the vibration of each vocal cord during phonation simultaneously with voice/speech recordings. A software for the analysis of the displacement of the arytenoids, surrogate markers of the vocal cords, will be developed to finely quantify the mobility of the laryngeal structures, by combining classical methods of motion analysis and deep learning methods. This approach will be evaluated: 1) to monitor speech therapy in patients with recurrent nerve injury and 2) to qualify radiation-induced dysphonia in patients with Head and Neck cancers treated with radiotherapy. For this project, three academic partners with complementary skills who have been collaborating for several years have joined forces with two industrial partners: Mindray Medical France and Apteryx. Mindray will develop an acquisition module dedicated to the functional study of vocal folds. Apteryx will develop a software to quantify the movement of laryngeal structures. This software will also allow the follow-up and the optimization of the management of patients with dysphonia.

ALMAS (the Arabic word for ‘diamond’), is an international and interdisciplinary consortium composed of excellent scientific partners based in different countries of Europe and America and aiming at renewing the study of the living and extinct languages of South Arabia (Oman, southwestern Saudi Arabia, Yemen). All these languages belong to the Semitic family and fall into three ‘fields’, which have up to now corresponded largely to separate academic traditions with few interconnections: a set of four ‘Ancient South Arabian’ languages (ASA), now extinct (Sabaic, Qatabanic, Minaic, Hadramitic); a group of six living ‘Modern South Arabian’ (MSA) languages with no written tradition, all endangered (Mehri, Harsusi, Bathari, Hobyot, Jibbali, Soqotri); a rich array of highly diversified and archaic Arabic vernaculars spoken throughout the region (‘South Arabian Arabic’: SAA). In order to disentangle the complex linguistic landscape of South Arabia, ALMAS has been designed around seven scientific tasks: three field-specific tasks concern the investigation of the individual languages (ASA, MSA, SAA); four transversal tasks are organized according to different lines of action: contact linguistics, phonetics and phonology, morphology and Semitic comparison. ALMAS will apply a threefold scientific methodology relying on (1) the already available original sources, (2) the collection of new data and (3) the IT treatment of both these groups of sources. First, a systematic re-examination of the literature and of the text critical editions will be undertaken, which is an essential pre-requisite to any research. Secondly, ALMAS will conduct regular fieldwork seasons in two of the modern countries of South Arabia, in order to collect new epigraphic and oral data. Finally, ALMAS will treat all relevant data through the most modern IT tools for digitization and exploitation of linguistic data. The novelty of ALMAS lies in the interdisciplinary synergy it creates in three ways: by cross-fertilizing synchronic and diachronic approaches to the abovementioned languages; by stimulating contacts between researchers of the three ‘fields’ of the project; by developing complementarity between linguists from different schools and approaches. ALMAS will set a landmark in the domain, by documenting the languages through fieldwork and creating a digitally-enhanced open-access database, thus contributing to the study and the protection of these languages; analyzing the data in order to reach an adequate understanding of the languages’ structures; reevaluating the relationships between the languages (phylogenetic relatedness and/or language contact). Moreover, as ALMAS focuses on endangered or understudied languages, it will have a vast socio-cultural impact In particular, ALMAS will help preserve linguistic heritage; foster cultural awareness among speakers of minority languages; influence educational policies and practices. In order to support the efforts of the consortium and all its manifold activities, the project includes dedicated structures for the scientific and administrative management of the network. A technical task intends to develop a web-based system to manage, analyze and share the study material and the scientific results of the project. Finally, ALMAS results will be disseminated through a diversified dissemination and exploitation plan addressed to different settings in the Western world and in the Arab countries (scientific milieu, governments, education, broad public).