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A phonetic-phonological study of vowel height and nasal coarticulation in French
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 June 2020
Abstract
The majority of previous studies on nasal coarticulation in French find an inversely proportionate relationship between vowel opening and nasality, such that high vowels are the most nasalized, sometimes exceeding 50% nasality. However, it has been unclear whether this is a mechanical or controlled property of French, given the typically short duration of high vowels in natural speech, as well as the aerodynamic and acoustic factors rendering them more susceptible to spontaneous nasalization. This study uses nasometric data to quantify progressive and regressive nasalization in 20 Northern Metropolitan French speakers as a function of vowel height. Furthermore, the relationship between degree of nasal coupling and overall vowel duration serves as a proxy for distinguishing mechanical from controlled nasalization, in the spirit of Solé (1992, 2007). This study finds evidence that high vowel nasalization in French is mechanical in pre-nasal position, but controlled in post-nasal position. Meanwhile, nasalization of mid and low vowels is blocked in pre-nasal position but, at most, mechanical in post-nasal position. In consequence, French appears to block nasalization in otherwise lexically impossible positions (*ṼN), while passively allowing, though not actively requiring, nasalizing in positions where conflation is possible (both NṼ and NV being permitted in the lexicon).
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Footnotes
I would like to acknowledge the audience members of the 2015 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistics Association, the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the Manchester Phonology Meeting 2017 for their comments and questions on earlier stages of this research. Many thanks to Hannah Bolte, Miguel Chagnon, Karthik Durvasula and Pavlo Pylyavskyy for their help with quantitative and/or statistical aspects of this article; to Julie Auger for her guidance at nearly all stages of the project; to my research assistant Andrée Boutin; to my participants for their generosity and finally to my anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Any remaining shortcomings are my own. This research was financed by the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Research grant #1360758) and the Bureau Recherche Développement Valorisation of the Université de Montréal.
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