Gradient linguopalatal variations due to a 4-level prosodic hierarchy in French

International audienceA large amount of work has established various kinds of articulatory strengthening of segments and of the modifications of the intra-/inter-segmental articulation dynamics depending on the level of prosodic boundaries. Studies on various languages have showed that a prosodic hierarchy accounts for variations of articulatory gestures and their coordination towards segmental strengthening and of reduction of coarticulation in initial, final or cross-boundary positions of constituents as function as up to 5 hierarchical levels (among others, [1; 2; 6]). In French, studies on this subject mainly focused on accent types [7] or initial position in prosodic constituents of different levels [3].The present study on French [8] focuses on the effects of a 4-level prosodic hierarchy on intra- and inter-segmental articulatory dynamics of linguopalatal gestures in initial, final and cross-boundary positions of prosodic units. Prosodic-dependant articulatory variations were observed in aC#Ca sequences embedded in a sentence, where CC stands for /kl/, /lk/, /kt/ or /tk/ - # for prosodic boundary -. Accent always fell on the first vowel /a/, which is in the nucleus of the final syllable of the prosodic constituent. 7 to 8 sentences were read without pause 12 or 15 times by 3 French speakers. Prosodic boundaries varied by manipulating the syntactic and thematic structures of utterances. The prosodic hierarchy was composed of 4 levels, from the lower to the higher: syllable/word level accentual level versus syllable/word level > terminal intonational level versus non terminal intonational level.The interpretation of the results concerns the architectures of the phonological representation based on a hierarchical prosodic constituency of speech structure. The discussion focuses mainly on the nature and, the number of, as well as the relationships between prosodic hierarchical levels, determined by specific intonational models of French prosody [4; 5].References:[1] Byrd, D., Kaun, A., Narayanan, S. & E. Saltzman (2000). Phrasal signature in articulation. In M.B. Broe & J. B. Pierrehumbert (eds), Papers in Laboratory Phonology V, 70-87. Cambridge: CUP.[2] Cho, T. (2001). Effects of Prosody on Articulation in English. UCLA: PhD dissertation.[3] Fougeron, C. (2001). Articulatory properties of initial segments in several constituents in French. Journal of Phonetics, 29, 109-135.[4] Hirst, D. & A. Di Cristo (1984). French intonation: a parametric approach. Die Neueren Sprache, 5, 554-569.[5] Jun, A-S. & C. Fougeron (2000). A phonological model of French intonation. In Intonation: Models and Technology, A. Botinis (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 209-242.[6] Keating, P., Cho, T., Fougeron, C. & C.H. Hsu (2003). Domain-initial articulatory strengthening in four languages. In J. Local, R. Odgen & R. Temple (eds), Papers in Laboratory Phonology VI. Cambridge: CUP.[7] Loevenbruck, H. (2000). An investigation of articulatory correlates of the accentual phrase in French. Proceedings of the 14th ICPhS, 667-670. San Francisco.[8] Meynadier, Y. (2003). Interaction entre prosodie et (co)articulation linguopalatale en français. Université de Provence: PhD dissertation