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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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Past research has shown that the speech processing system is, under
certain circumstances, relatively tolerant to surface variations in
connected speech. The goal of this study is to explore regressive voice
assimilation in French, a surface variation in which the voicing of
a consonant is modified by the voicing of the following consonant.
French subjects pronounced sentences containing words with plosive
codas inserted in either assimilatory or non-assimilatory contexts.
We carried out acoustic analyses and defined an index for voice assimilation.
We observed that regressive voice assimilation in French is a graded
rather than an all-or-none phonological phenomenon. The strength of
assimilation did not depend on the following context (stops or fricatives).
There was a significant effect of the underlying voicing: voiceless
stops assimilated more strongly than voiced stops. Such acoustic trends
should be taken into account when studying the perceptual consequences
of voice assimilation.
Bibliographic reference. Snoeren, Natalie D. / Segui, Juan (2003): "A voice for the voiceless: voice assimilation in French", In ICPhS-15, 2325-2328.