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Please find enclosed a link to the PhD offer: Flexibility of speech comprehension processes In this PhD. project, we will study how we process non-standard speech sounds. Newborns can discriminate all the sounds
of world's languages and it's the exposure to a mother tongue that will restructure perceptual abilities into phonological abilities specific to that language. As a result, children will quickly become "deaf" or at least less sensitive to linguistic features
that are not relevant and useful in their native language. Yet our system must also be flexible because we are regularly in contact with non-standard productions, such as the ones of a person with a strong accent or a person with a cold and a stuffy nose.
The perceptual flexibility necessary to understand a message is essential and yet extremely variable from one individual to another (Perrone-Bertolotti, Tassin & Meunier, 2017). In previous studies, we were interested in an extreme case of this non-standard
speech, the whistled speech, a natural adaptation of speech (Meyer, Dentel and Meunier, 2017). The interindividual variability observed in the capacity to perceive and therefore to understand non-standard speech is very important even in individuals without
auditory or language impairments. It becomes extreme for individuals who have even slight hearing losses. In this thesis, we will explore these differences in order to characterize more finely on the one hand the speech signal alterations that generate the
most divergent perceptions and on the other hand the alterations that are most easily compensated by the system. Thus we will be able to define the limits of speech variability for which the message remains understandable. This work will be based on acoustic
analyzes of language productions and the setting up of psycholinguistic experiments. This thesis work will therefore aim to capture the acoustic features necessary for the understanding of speech and their resistance to alterations, while taking into account
the interindividual variabilities through the characteristics of individuals and situations of communication. Best, |