Acoustic, kinematic and aerodynamic aspects of word-initial and word-final vowels in pre-boundary context in French

Cédric Gendrot (1)

1 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

Four speakers repeated 8 times 15 sentences containing ‘pVp'
syllables (V being /a/, /i/ and /u/). The ‘pVp' syllables were located in
final, penultimate and antepenultimate position relatively to the
Intonational Phrase (IP) boundary. They were embedded in lexical
words of 1-3 syllables and were either word-initial or word-final.
Results show that the closer the vowel in word-final position is to the
IP boundary, the longer the duration and the higher the fundamental
frequency of the vowel; it is also characterised by larger lip opening
gestures. The potential reduction or coarticulation of vowels in wordinitial
position compared to their counterparts in word-final position is
discussed.

Mots clés: articulatory prosody; prosody; articulation; French; boundaries

Domaines: Linguistique

Cédric Gendrot. Acoustic, kinematic and aerodynamic aspects of word-initial and word-final vowels in pre-boundary context in French. Zas Papers in Linguistics, 2005, 40, pp.45-61. ⟨halshs-00188018⟩