14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Levels of Rhythmicity in French: A Comparison between Three Speaking Styles

Corine Astésano

Institut de Phonétique, CNRS ESA 6057 "Parole et Langage", Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, France

French rhythmic organization is characterized by a tendency for both accentual and syllabic regularity. This apparent duality results from the tendency in French to produce rather equal rhythmic groups in terms of duration and number of syllables, and when this can not be possible, to balance rhythmic groups by introducing an initial (rhythmic) accent. However, the different levels of timing realization are not equally solicited according to speaking styles. Indeed, we show that the way in which the different levels of prosodic constituency are affected by rhythmicity contributes to put the different speaking styles (from spontaneous to read speech) on a ‘metricity’ scale.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Astésano, Corine (1999): "Levels of rhythmicity in French: a comparison between three speaking styles", In ICPhS-14, 253-256.