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Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech CommunicationBarcelona, Catalonia, Spain |
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Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech CommunicationBarcelona, Catalonia, Spain |
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F2 was measured in CV syllables occurring in the spontaneous speech of five speakers. The effect of speaker's tempo, word novelty and syntactic prominence on CV contextual assimilation was particularly investigated. The degree of contextual assimilation partly depends on tempo. The information value of words seemed to have an effect on contextual assimilation since the difference in formant frequency between the CV boundary and the vowel nucleus is smaller in old words than in new words. Syllables carrying syntactic prominence showed a larger formant excursion from the CV boundary to the nucleus than the non prominent ones as observed in other languages. However, compared with Swedish, the contextual asimilation of non prominent syllables in French appeared to be less important. This difference may be due to the temporal organisation specific to each language. This latter result confirms Delattre's (1969) previous findings which showed that the "unstressed" vowel is not reduced by the same amount and the same manner in all languages.
Bibliographic reference. Duez, Danielle (1991): "Some factors affecting F2-patterns in spontaneous speech in French", In PPoSpSt-1991, paper 021.