case of enchaînement in French

This paper investigates how the phonetic surface form of segments is influenced by their word and syllable position. Word boundaries in French are often considered to be blurred in running speech by phenomena such as enchaînement, in which word-final consonants are said to be (re-)syllabified across word boundaries with a following word-initial vowel. In this study, VCV sequences containing either an enchaînement sequence, a word-initial, or a word-medial CV syllable are compared to test for preservation of contrast between these different structures. Acoustic comparisons show that enchaînement consonants do not have the surface form of an onset. Consonantal properties, along with differences in the surrounding vowels, contribute to the preservation of contrast between enchaînement sequences and sequences containing an underlying onset. Word-initial and word-medial onsets do not differ reliably, while word boundary cues are found in the acoustics of the surrounding vowels. In addition, a perception experiment shows better monitoring performance for a CV sequence extracted from the enchaînement condition than for an underlying tautosyllabic sequence, suggesting that listeners can use bottom-up information in the processing of enchaînement. Taken together, these results show that enchaînement in French does not imply a neutralization of the acoustic or perceptual contrast with sequences containing an underlying CV syllabic structure. 1