Segmental “Anchorage” and the French late rise

International audienceWe examined the tonal alignment and scaling patterns of the start and end points of the French late rise, using a rate manipulation paradigm. Our findings call into question aspects of the segmental anchoring hypothesis: the low starting point of the late rise was not stably anchored to a segmental landmark, and for some speakers, F0 excursion size varied across rates. The position of the peak of the late rise was found to vary across syllable structures. To account for the observed patterns, we propose the notion of an “anchorage,” that is, a region within which an intonational turning point can anchor. For the peak of the French late rise, this anchorage stretches from just before the end of the vowel of the last full syllable of the accentual phrase to the end of the phrase