Lexical confusability and nasal coarticulation in French

Abstract

Previous research has revealed a relationship between lexical confusability and degree of coarticulation [Brown (2001); Scarborough (2004)]. In particular, English speakers produce confusable, or ‘‘hard’’ words with more nasal and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation than less confusable, ‘‘easy’’ ones. Thus, it has been suggested that speakers produce additional coarticulation in order to increase the intelligibility of ‘‘hard’’ words. Here, the relation between nasal coarticulation and lexical confusability is investigated for French, a language in which vowel nasality is phonemically contrastive (at least for a subset of vowels) and might constrain such a lexical effect. Acoustic measures of nasality show that ‘‘hard’’ words (those with low usage frequencies and many frequent, phonologically similar neighbors) exhibit more nasal coarticulation than ‘‘easy’’ ones (those with high frequencies and few, low-frequency neighbors) in French as well. Interestingly, however, the effect emerges only for words containing vowels that can exhibit phonemic oral-nasal contrasts (oral vowels with nasal counterparts). Thus, where the use of nasality in phonological contrast is constrained, coarticulatory nasality is constrained, too. But the existence of phonological contrast does not itself constrain the lexical confusability effect: increased coarticulatory nasality contributes to lexically motivated phonetic enhancement in French, while even more nasality provides the basis for phonemic contrast.