Variability of (French) /ʁ/ is a frequently studied phenomenon
showing that /ʁ/ can have multiple realizations. In French, all
these studies were undertaken using small read corpora and we have
reason to believe that these corpora don’t allow to look at the
full picture. Indeed factors such as local word frequency, as well
as speech rate can have almost as much influence as phonemic context
in the realization of /ʁ/.
According to Ohala’s
Aerodynamic Voicing principle, /ʁ/ would tend to be either an
unvoiced fricative or a voiced approximant. We chose to analyze word
final /ʁ/s as they tend to embrace the largest spectrum of variation.
The study realized here is two-fold: a perception study in a specific
phonemic context, between /a/ and /l/, where /ʁ/ is realized
as an approximant, so as to better understand the parameters and their
thresholds necessary for /ʁ/ identification, and provide a measure
of rhoticity.
In a second step, keeping the rhoticity measurement in mind, we
analyzed the realizations of word final /ʁ/s in two continuous
speech corpora and modelled the realization of /ʁ/ using predictors
such as diphone and digram frequency, phonemic context and speech rate.
Cite as: Gendrot, C. (2017) Perception and Production of Word-Final /ʁ/ in French. Proc. Interspeech 2017, 3926-3930, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2017-990
@inproceedings{gendrot17_interspeech,
author={Cedric Gendrot},
title={{Perception and Production of Word-Final /ʁ/ in French}},
year=2017,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2017},
pages={3926--3930},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2017-990}
}