Acoustic and articulatory evidence for the phonological status of liaison consonants

Abstract

French liaison consonants (LC) are a special class of word-final segments whose realization depends on a combination of phonological, lexical, and syntactic factors. Most previous analyses viewed LCs as coda consonants realized only before vowel-initial words. Because of their special status as syntactically and lexically conditioned, an interesting question is whether LCs exhibit typical acoustic and articulatory characteristics of word-final consonants. This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation of LCs in adjective+noun pairings in Quebec French, using electromagnetic articulography to collect kinematic data. Compared to typical coda and onset consonants, liaison consonants were found to exhibit smaller magnitude release gestures, and in some cases, LC closure gestures were more similar to those of onsets than codas. Unlike coda consonants, LCs did not induce gestural shortening or laxing (F1 raising) of the preceding vowel. Hence our results indicate that, although LCs have been analyzed as word-final consonants, they exhibit neither typical coda- or onset-like acoustic and articulatory properties. These results are important because they show that syntactically conditioned lexical phonology can result in non-canonical articulatory patterns, and hence speak to the need for models of production to incorporate both lexical representations and syntactic context as factors.