Liaison and schwa deletion in French: an effect of lexical frequency and competition?

Abstract

This study aims to determine whether the production of the lexical variants created by the phonological processes of liaison and schwa deletion in French are conditioned by factors linked to lexical recognition. We hypothesise that the realisation of these variants would be favoured for words which are lexically “salient” in term of frequency and in their lexical neighbourhoods. This claim was tested by examining a speech corpus for the effects of lexical frequency, neighbourhood density and neighbourhood frequency on the production of liaison (both in linking and linked words and their co-occurrence) and elision. Overall the results do not support our hypothesis: lexical frequency and competition do not appear to influence strongly whether liaison and elision are realised or not.