Julien Meyer

My research as an Eurias Fellow bears on acoustic iconicity in languages. The focus of the project is on three natural oral practices which consist in mapping normal speech to very different acoustic signals such as whistling, instrumental music and animal calls. These are respectively called ‘whistled languages’, ‘the singing mode of traditional musical instruments’ and ‘onomatopoetic words named after animal calls’. They exist in a significant diversity of languages all over the world and represent an opportunity to study under various angles the perceptive and productive adaptation of different language structures into simple acoustic signals or musical melodies. They are inherently interdisciplinary phenomena raising important questions on the phonology and the evolution of languages. So far, they have been very little studied under phonetic and cognitive perspectives because they are hard to locate and document, being still practiced only in remote rural areas. However, since 2003, I have worked on the description of 13 whistled and 5 instrumental forms of languages of Europe, Asia and South America. Moreover, I have developed a linguistic documentation and description project in the Amazon region since 2008 among the Gavião, the Suruí (Rondônia, Brazil) and, more recently, the Wayãpi people (Amapá, Brazil and French Guiana) who use all three types of iconic transformations.

During my academic year in the Collegium of Lyon, I will develop an original methodology to compare these different modalities of acoustic imitation. One important objective will be to identify language-specific or modality-specific strategies of phonetic mapping. A special attention will be paid to the description and the publication of the information collected recently in the Amazon with collaborators in Brazil and French Guiana. To come to a better understanding of the cognitive mapping processes at play, I will also use field recorded stimuli as a base to develop original perceptual experiments in collaboration with French researchers of Lyon, using psycholinguistic methodology to test different target populations (native speakers of both tonal and non tonal languages). Meanwhile, I will set up an interdisciplinary research team in France to continue to work on these innovative topics and methodologies. This will provide a suitable background to build international partnerships, in particular with the Linguistic Division of the Museu Goeldi (Belém, Brazil) where I have been working since 2008.