Variable Word-Final Schwa in French: An OT Analysis

This study examined both schwa insertion and simplification following word-final consonant clusters in a large corpus of spoken French and asked how do variables , such as speech style, following context, motivation for simplification and speech rate, affect the variable pronunciations of word-final consonant clusters. The results presented in this large sample corpus analysis should help to clarify the role of many phonological and stylistic factors – such as the identity of the cluster, the following context , and speaking rate – in how likely each process (simplification or schwa insertion) is to apply. The predictions of mixed-effects logistic regression models suggest that the dialectal differences between Québec and France are not as simple as " simplification in Québec, schwa insertion in France ". The differences in the effects of different factors between the dialects points towards the most interesting finding of the paper, that the two processes are related in each dialect, but in different ways. Remarkably, there seems to have been almost no previous work discussing both simplification and schwa insertion together, despite the fact that they target the same context (word-final clusters) in the same language. While the results presented here indicate that the process of simplification following a word-final consonant cluster is similar in both dialects, the process of schwa insertion is likely to be different in each dialect. In both dialects, word-final consonant cluster simplification is more frequent in a pre-consonantal context; is most likely in a spontaneous or less formal speech style and in that speech style is positively associated with higher speaking rates. Schwa insertion following a word-final consonant cluster displays much stronger dialectal differences. Schwa insertion in the dialect from France is strongly affected by following context and possibly speech style. Schwa insertion in the dialect from Québec is not affected by following context and is strongly predicted by a lack of consonant cluster simplification.

Eighth Annual Conference of …, 2007

This paper examines the nature of the process involved in optional schwa elision in French. More specifically, it aims at testing whether this process is gradual or categorical, on the basis of an analysis of the distribution of the duration of over 4000 schwas extracted from a large corpus of continuous speech. The distribution observed is bimodal, with absent schwas (at 0 ms duration) on one side, and realized schwas on the other side, the two groups being separated by a small gap in the distribution. Realized schwas present cases of strong temporal reduction, but this reduction does not show a continuous pattern toward zero duration, as would be predicted if schwa elision was the end-point of a gradual reduction process. Different interpretations of this distribution are discussed.

Sandhi phenomena in the languages of Europe, ed. by Henning Andersen, pp. 167–210., 1986

Consonant liaison is perhaps the most salient and most often discussed external sandhi in French. It takes its origin in a series of processes which reduced syllable codas in Old French, and which are responsible not only for liaison in the narrow sense, but also for allomorphic alternations between free and bound stems for some words, e.g. beau-bel ‘beautiful (masc.)’, and between morphologically related stems, e. g. cheval-chevaux ‘horse-horses’ or chaud-chaude ‘hot (masc.)-hot (fern.)’. This paper examines the history of word-final consonant deletion and consonant liaison in the various dialects of Northern French. Section 1 recapitulates the phonological evolution that led to the reduction of syllable codas in Proto-French; section 2 presents the various pressures that may have been involved in its further evolution (phonetic, morphological, and stylistic factors); sections 3 to 7 examine the development of final consonants before pause; sections 8 to 15 that of the sandhi associated with word-final consonants.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2010

This study examines whether the production of words with two phonological variants involves single or multiple lexical phonological representations. Three production experiments investigated the roles of the relative frequencies of the two pronunciation variants of French words with schwa: the schwa variant (e.g., ) and the reduced variant (e.g., ). In two naming tasks and in a symbol–word association learning task, variants with higher relative frequencies were produced faster. This suggests that the production lexicon keeps a frequency count for each variant and hence that schwa words are represented in the production lexicon with two different lexemes. In addition, the advantage for schwa variants over reduced variants in the naming tasks but not in the learning task and the absence of a variant relative frequency effect for schwa variants produced in isolation support the hypothesis that context affects the variants’ lexical activation and modulates the effect of variant relative frequency.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018

In order to convey pragmatic functions, a speaker has to select an intonation contour (the tune) in addition to the words that are to be spoken (the text). The tune and text are assumed to be independent of each other, such that any one intonation contour can be produced on different phrases, regardless of the number and nature of the segments they are made up of. However, if the segmental string is too short, certain tunes-especially those with a rising component-call for adjustments to the text. In Italian, for instance, loan words such as "chat" can be produced with a word final schwa when this word occurs at the end of a question. This paper investigates this word final schwa in the Bari variety in a number of different intonation contours. Although its presence and duration is to some extent dependent on idiosyncratic properties of speakers and words, schwa is largely conditioned by intonation. Schwa cannot thus be considered a mere phonetic artefact, since it is rele...

2019

Phrase-final vowel devoicing is a feature of Continental French in which utterance-final vowels variably lose their voicing and produce fricative-like whistles. Although the phenomenon is singularly referred to as “vowel devoicing,” most research on the topic ignores the parameter of voicing loss in favor of a description of the emergent downstream fricative, a fact that is complicated even further when considering that the fricative by-product is not uniform in nature. In this study, we investigate the multiplicity of phonetic phenomena occurring under the heading of “final vowel devoicing” via an analysis of normalized measures of center of gravity. Six resulting COG profile shapes emerge: one describing literal vowel devoicing, the others describing five different energy profiles of fricative epenthesis. Results indicate an interaction of vowel and percent devoicing, suggesting that PFVD is a singular phenomenon with several allophonic realizations predicted by both vowel type an...

2003

The current paper reports on a study which fits in a larger investigation on variability in the pronunciation of Standard Dutch, as spoken in the Netherlands and the Flemish part of Belgium. In particular, it deals with the factors that determine the possible insertion of a schwa in specific consonant clusters at the end of words. Our study reveals that the absence or occurrence of such an extra vowel is dependent on regional, social and phonotactic determinants. We discuss how this finding, in combination with other results on speech variability, is important for speech technological applications, both for synthesis and recognition.

Speech Communication, 2005

The paper presents a study of syllabic structures and their variation in a large corpus of French radio interview speech. A further aim is to show how automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems can serve as a linguistic tool to consistently explore virtually unlimited speech corpora. Automatically selected subsets can be manually checked to accumulate knowledge on pronunciation variants. Our belief is that better formalised knowledge of variant mechanisms will ultimately contribute to improve pronunciation modelling and ASR systems. This study is meant to be a step in this direction. The linguistic phenomena we are particularly interested in, are sequential variants (i.e. variants with different numbers of phonemes) which may or not entail syllabic restructuring. These variants, frequent in spontaneous speech, are known to be particularly difficult for speech recognizers. To focus on sequential variants, a methodology has been set up using descriptions at the phonemic, syllabic and lexical levels.

Journal of French Language Studies, 2007

This article examines the phonological status of schwa in clitics, in particular whether or not schwa should be included in their lexical representation. Several distributional and experimental arguments pointing to the lexical status of clitic schwas are reviewed and are shown to be inconclusive, due to the existence of additional data that suggest a different interpretation not involving underlying schwas. The discussion includes experimental results that fail to show residual lip rounding in the vicinity of an omitted schwa at clitic boundaries, contra Barnes and Kavitskaya's (2002) previous claim. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the non-contrastive nature of clitic schwas militates against their underlying status.

Jacques Durand & Bernard Laks (eds.) Current Trends in Phonology. CNRS, Université Paris-X & University of Salford: University of Salford publications, 485-507., 1996