Phonetic reduction versus phonological deletion of French schwa: Some methodological issues

Bürki, Audrey; Fougeron, Cécile; Gendrot, Cédric; Frauenfelder, Ulrich Hans

doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2010.07.003

Cited by 37 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The reduction of consonants and vowels is pervasive in spontaneous conversational speech, as attested in a rising number of corpus studies [Kohler, 2000;Ernestus, 2000;Johnson, 2004;Adda-Decker et al, 2005;Schuppler et al, 2011;Adda-Decker and Snoeren, 2011;Bürki et al, 2011]. In spite of the increasing interest in speech reduction phenomena, much remains to be explored about their phonetic characteristics and conditioning factors.…”

Section: Speech Reduction and Goal Of The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Weakening of Intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish

Torreira

Ernestus

2012

Phonetica

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This study describes the weakening of intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish and investigates the role of several potential conditioning factors, including morphological, lexical and probabilistic variables. Three acoustic parameters were examined: voicing, the difference in high-band (4-8 kHz) intensity between /s/ and the following vowel, and the duration of the dip in low-band (0-1.5 kHz) intensity in /s/. Over a third of the /s/ consonants exhibited uninterrupted voicing. All three parameters were highly sensitive to speech rate and, less consistently, to prosodic factors such as word position and stress. We also found that /s/ suffixes in redundant morphosyntactic contexts were more prone to weakening than other word-final /s/ segments. Several high-frequency words were particularly prone to weakening, but no general probabilistic effects were observed for factors claimed to favor reduction such as word frequency, contextual predictability or grammatical class. These findings demonstrate the complex variability characteristic of reduction phenomena in spontaneous speech.

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Section: Speech Reduction and Goal Of The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Weakening of Intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish

Torreira

Ernestus

2012

Phonetica

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“…On the basis of a large corpus of French interviews, Adda-Decker, Boula de Mareüil, Adda, and Lamel (2005) report that French vowels were completely deleted in 6% of the tokens. These extreme phonetic reductions have been shown to affect the schwa vowel as well (Bürki, Fougeron, Gendrot, & Frauenfelder, 2011b). Consequently, some of the word tokens in which no schwa can be heard necessarily result from a gradient reduction, irrespective of whether the schwa is also deleted categorically in other word tokens.…”

Section: Description and Classification Of Variation Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production

Bürki

2018

Psychon Bull Rev

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The pronunciation of words is highly variable. This variation provides crucial information about the cognitive architecture of the language production system. This review summarizes key empirical findings about variation phenomena, integrating corpus, acoustic, articulatory, and chronometric data from phonetic and psycholinguistic studies. It examines how these data constrain our current understanding of word production processes and highlights major challenges and open issues that should be addressed in future research.

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“…For instance, Fougeron et al (2007) and Burki et al (2011) found that schwa duration is 50 ms on average. In this study, schwas are on average 86 ± 17 ms long.…”

Section: Stormementioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are several factors which could explain this difference. First, both Fougeron et al (2007) and Burki et al (2011) are corpus-based studies of natural speech and therefore speech rate is likely to be faster. Second, schwas in these studies occur in a much wider range of prosodic contexts than in the present study and this could have an effect on mean schwa duration.…”

Section: Stormementioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of schwa duration on pre-schwa mid-vowel lowering in French

Storme

2017

AMP

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In Southern French, mid vowels are lowered in open syllables before schwa and in closed syllables. I propose that mid-vowel lowering is a strategy to enhance the perceptibility of a following consonant lacking good release cues. Open syllables followed by schwa behave like closed syllables and not like open syllables followed by a full vowel because, as a short vowel, schwa does not provide long enough release transitions to adequately cue a preceding consonant. This study provides evidence that the likelihood of lowering pre-schwa mid vowels decreases as schwa duration increases, in accordance with the perceptual hypothesis. The effect of schwa duration on mid vowel quality is derived in a model of phonology allowing for speaker-specific details of phonetic realization to influence phonotactics.

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Phonetic reduction versus phonological deletion of French schwa: Some methodological issues

Cited by 37 publications

References 22 publications

Weakening of Intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish

Weakening of Intervocalic /s/ in the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish

Variation in the speech signal as a window into the cognitive architecture of language production

The effect of schwa duration on pre-schwa mid-vowel lowering in French

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