Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T01:18:26.168Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.