The nature of the schwa/zero alternation in French clitics: experimental and non-experimental evidence

Côté, Marie Hélène; Morrison, Geoffrey Stewart

doi:10.1017/s0959269507002827

Cited by 40 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Dell (1985), for example, treats some word boundary schwas as underlying, such as the one in (5d), consistent with the orthography. Schwas at clitic boundaries are especially controversial, and authors are divided as to whether to treat them as epenthetic (Côté 2000;Côté & Morrison 2007;Kaplan 2016) or underlying (Tranel 1981;Lyche & Durand 1996;Jetchev 1999). We'll focus on the distinction between schwas at word boundaries and clitic boundaries, since those are the two contexts we consider in our experiment and model.…”

Section: (5)mentioning

confidence: 99%

French schwa and gradient cumulativity

Smith

Pater

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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We explore the interaction of two phonological factors that condition schwa-zero alternations in French: schwa is more likely after two consonants than a singleton; and schwa is more likely between stressed syllables than elsewhere. Using new data from a judgment study, we show that both factors play a role in schwa epenthesis and deletion, and that the two factors interact cumulatively: they have a stronger effect together than individually. Treating each factor as a constraint, we find that their cumulative interaction is better modeled with weighted than with ranked constraints. We provide a characterization of patterns of cumulativity in probability space in terms of the effect of constraint on its own versus its effect in a cumulative interaction with another constraint. Stochastic OT can model cumulative interactions, but only sublinear ones, where the effect of a constraint is weaker in the cumulative context than on its own. Weighted constraint models, MaxEnt and Noisy HG, can model the full range of cumulativity-sublinear, linear, and superlinear. In examining the ability of these models to fit our experimental data, we find that Stochastic OT is hampered by the fact that the data displays superlinear cumulativity. Noisy HG and MaxEnt fare better on this dataset, with MaxEnt yielding the best fit.

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Section: (5)mentioning

confidence: 99%

French schwa and gradient cumulativity

Smith

Pater

2020

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…The only French determiner for which a gender congruency effect was tested so far is the definite singular determiner. As mentioned above, the two genders share the same pronunciation before vowels, and the alternation between the "full" and "reduced" pronunciations can easily be accounted for by a general phonological process (see Côté & Morrison, 2007 for a summary of the phonological literature on le and other clitics). Other determiners in French differ from the singular definite determiners in one or several dimensions.…”

Section: The Current Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Representation and selection of determiners with phonological variants.

Bürki¹,

Besana²,

Degiorgi³

et al. 2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of cross-linguistic differences in the time course of determiner selection during language production. In Germanic languages, participants are slower at naming a picture using a determiner + noun utterance (die Katze "the cat") when a superimposed distractor is of a different gender (gender congruency effect). In Romance languages in which the pronunciation of the determiner also depends on the phonology of the next word, there is no such effect. This difference is traditionally assumed to arise because determiners are selected later in Romance languages (late selection hypothesis). It has further been suggested that in a given language, all determiners are either selected late or early (maximum consistency principle). Data on French have challenged these 2 hypotheses by revealing a gender congruency effect when participants name pictures using the definite singular determiner le-la (l' before vowels) and a noun, at positive stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), that is, when there is a delay between the presentation of the picture and that of the distractor. We examined this finding further and investigated whether it generalizes to the indefinite determiner un-une. Results of 4 picture-word interference experiments reveal that gender congruency effects in French are not restricted to the definite determiner or positive SOAs, but can be hard to detect in experiments which do not account for the variability in reading and naming times across participants and trials. We discuss the implications of these results for the modeling of determiner selection across languages. (PsycINFO Database Record

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“…They further reported a gap between the first and second modes and concluded that schwa deletion in this language is a categorical process. Several studies, however, also reported evidence that French nonschwa variants retain acoustic and/ or articulatory traces of the schwa vowel (Barnes & Kavitskaya, 2002;Rialland, 1986; but see Côté & Morrison, 2007). Bürki, Ernestus, Gendrot, Fougeron, and Frauenfelder (2011a) suggested that occurrences of nonschwa variants may result from two distinct processes, a specific categorical deletion process and a general gradient reduction process.…”

Section: Acoustic Deletions/reductionsmentioning

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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The nature of the schwa/zero alternation in French clitics: experimental and non-experimental evidence

Cited by 40 publications

References 23 publications

French schwa and gradient cumulativity

French schwa and gradient cumulativity

Representation and selection of determiners with phonological variants.

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

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