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

Articulation of Prosodic Phrasing In French

Cécile Fougeron

Lab. de Psycholinguistique Expérimentale, U. de Genève, Switzerland

This study investigates how segmental articulation is affected by the position of a segment in a prosodic constituent in French. Linguopalatal contact, nasal flow or frequency of glottalization are compared for various segments placed in four different prosodic positions: Intonational Phrase-initial, Accentual Phraseinitial, Word-initial and Syllable-initial. Results show that segments initial in higher prosodic domains tend to have more linguopalatal contact, higher frequency of glottalization or lower nasal flow than segments initial in lower domains. Although the observed effects can vary in magnitude depending on the articulator, the speaker or the segment observed, these regular articulatory variations tend to reflect the prosodic encoding of utterances into constituents of various levels.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Fougeron, Cécile (1999): "Articulation of prosodic phrasing in French", In ICPhS-14, 675-678.