Common use of Shift of the Clause in Contracts

Shift of the. vowel boundaries according to the context Within the framework of language learning for the French- German pair, vowel duration analysis is important to evaluate lexical accent, vowel quantity (which exists in German but not in French) as well as fluency. Thus, reliable vowel boundaries are mandatory. Figures 3 and 4 show histograms of shifts of the limits between vowels and different classes of consonants. Figure 3. Histogram of the shifts of the boundaries between vowels and their right context. Let us comment the results for which the boundaries shifts are the most important in both contexts: /m, n/ and /l, R/. Results for /l,R/ were expected since these consonants have a very clear, vowel-like formant structure when they are in vocalic contexts. Such results could have been worse since CoALT excludes the boundaries considered as fuzzy by the expert annotator (but not those of the student annotators). On the other hand, results for /m,n/ were somewhat unexpected since the boundaries between nasals and vowels can be put with a good precision when the sentences are pronounced by French speakers. We believe that the relative lack of precision observed in this context is due to nasalization of vowels by German speakers. Indeed, French speakers, who have oral and nasal vowels in their phonological system, tend to preserve the phonemic contrast between them. In languages with no nasal vowels, such as English or German, oral vowels in contact with nasal consonants undergo a greater degree of nasal coarticulation [6]. The vowel nasalization leads to an unsteady vocalic signal difficult to segment, which may explain the divergence between the annotators. Hence, caution should be taken when using these specific boundaries. Figure 4. Percentage of boundaries between vowels and their left context for [0, 10ms[ and [10, 20ms[.