Acoustic measurement of Canadian English and Canadian French interlingual homophones.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine how interlingual homophones of Canadian English (CE) and Canadian French (CF) differ along acoustic dimensions as a prelude to perceptual tests. Two male Canadian monolingual speakers of English and French produced sentences in which interlingual homophones were embedded (e.g., two /thu/ and /tu/ meaning all). Voiced onset times (VOTs), formant frequencies (F1 and F2), and vowel‐inherent spectral changes (VISCs) of each respective speaker were examined. First, it is expected that the CE monolingual speaker will have aspirated (long‐lag) voiceless stops, while the CF monolingual speaker will have unaspirated (short‐lag) voiceless stops regardless of the context. Second, it is expected that CF vowels will have lower F1 values for lax vowels and will be produced more peripherally (with respect to F2 values) than CE vowels (i.e., French front vowels will be more advanced, and French back vowels will be more posterior). Lastly, it is expected that CF vowels will have less vowel‐inherent spectral change than CE vowels. Results from this study will provide insight on the phonetic representation of interlingual homophones, enabling the understanding of acoustic‐phonetic influences on the processes of speech perception in bilinguals (CE and CF).