Speech reduction: position within French prosodic structure

International audienceVariation in the speech signal is a characteristic of spoken language, emerging partially as a result of interactions between various linguistic levels. One example of variation is phonetic reduction, where words are produced with missing or underspecified phonetic forms. Using a French conversational corpus, this paper focuses on the relationship between reduction and prosodic structure to see whether certain positions favor the occurrence of reduction. We annotated and observed the distribution of reduced sequences within specific prosodic domains (Intonational and Accentual Phrases). Preliminary analyses revealed that the detected reductions occur mostly mid-IP and very rarely at IP-final. However, this pattern may vary among speakers, as speakers have different patterns in terms of the number of reductions produced and their positions. It is also usually the case that the reduced sequences occurring mid-IP, coincide with the AP level boundaries, extending from one AP to another