On spontaneous French speech: aspects of the reduction and contextual assimilation of voiced stops

Abstract

Some of the effects of underarticulation on the acoustic structure of intervocalic voiced stops in spontaneous French speech were investigated in both perceptual and spectrographic studies. A certain number of voiced stops were shown to be reduced or assimilated with adjacent vowels or nearby consonants. Interestingly, the place of articulation was found to be maintained in assimilated and reduced consonants. These results were interpreted in light of Carré & Mrayati’s model (1990) which assumes that consonants are produced by structured transversal gestures articulated at specific places. In spontaneous speech, there may be greater overlap of phonetic gestures, or a given phonetic gesture may be incompletely produced. However, as consonantal gestures are transversal, specific places are maintained. Speech gesture economy seems to be particularly applicable to informal speech situations, but has also been shown to conflict with a certain number of linguistic factors such as the prominence pattern of an utterance. The dispersion cues of a phoneme within a language and within a style are probably limited and constrained by a set of rules which remain to be defined.