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Vowel Devoicing in Contemporary French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2003

CAROLINE L. SMITH
CAROLINE L. SMITH
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Abstract

Fagyal and Moisset (1999) suggested that vowel devoicing in standard French occurs most often in phrase-final high vowels. An experiment testing the effect of both immediate segmental context and sentence-level contextual factors was conducted to further identify the linguistic features involved. Six French speakers were recorded reading test sentences. Devoicing only occurred in sentence-final vowels, but in more contexts than expected. From a cross-linguistic perspective the distribution of devoicing in French is unusual. Final position is prosodically prominent in French, whereas in many languages devoicing is a form of vowel reduction associated with lack of prominence. Different physical mechanisms may therefore be responsible.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , September 2003 , pp. 177 - 194
Copyright
2003 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Many thanks to the speakers who participated in this experiment, and to Catie Berkenfield and Lisa Hogan, who analysed much of the data. Financial support was provided by a grant from the University of New Mexico Research Allocations Committee, and by NSF grant BCS-9983106.