I am a postdoctoral researcher at the “Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie” since October 2020. My main research domains are the interaction between lexical tone an intonation, the morphological expression of focus and the small-scale multilingualism.
At the LPP, together with Martine Adda-Decker we are developing a phonemically-aligned corpus of Kakabe, a Western Mande language spoken in Guinea. Based on this time-aligned data, we will explore two topics. First, we will investigate the devoicing of the utterance-final syllables. The devoicing, which can affect the final vowel or even the whole syllable, accompanies one of the four intonational patterns existing in Kakabe. Second, we will analyze th realization of the coda-final nasal consonant. With the exception of borrowings, the nasal is the only consonants that can appear in Kakabe in the coda-final position and it is subject to variety of assimilation processes. This work is part of the ANPR project “Computational language documentation by 2025.
Kakabe Corpus and fieldwork: I have been doing fieldwork in Guinea since 2008. One of the results is the creation of a multi-media corpus of spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech. The Kakakbe corpus is accessibe at: the Pangloss collection, the CorpOrAn collection and the ELAR archive.