15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


A Kinematic Study of Prosodic Boundary Effects on /i/ Articulation in French

Marija Tabain (1), Pascal Perrier (2), Christophe Savariaux (2)

(1) Macquarie University, Australia
(2) ICP-CNRS, France

This study presents kinematic data for the vowel /i/ at several different prosodic boundaries in French. It follows on from previous work presented in Tabain (in press), where the vowel /a/ was shown to be highly affected by the strength of the prosodic boundary.
   Consistent with previous data showing minimal contextual variability in the production of /i/, our results show minimal effects of prosodic boundary strength on tongue and jaw movement for /i/. However, durational data show the same pattern as is observed for all other speech sounds. We suggest that since a very precise production of /i/ is important for correct perception of this vowel, the speaker is not free to mark the prosodic hierarchy in terms of supralaryngeal articulation in the same way as it is marked for /a/. For this reason we suggest that duration is still the primary marker of prosodic boundaries in French.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Tabain, Marija / Perrier, Pascal / Savariaux, Christophe (2003): "A kinematic study of prosodic boundary effects on /i/ articulation in French", In ICPhS-15, 2617-2620.