Spectral properties of Quebec French sibilants

Abstract

Most acoustic work on sibilants has focused on English /s/ and /ʃ/, examining spectra of the middle portion of these consonants. Voiced sibilants, which are rarer cross-linguistically (Ohala, 1983), as well as sibilants in other languages, have received less attention; in particular, there has been no previous work on Quebec French. Previous cross-linguistic studies have suggested important differences in sibilant acoustics exist between languages (Gordon et al., 2002), including in the dynamics of spectral properties over the course of the segment (Reidy, 2016). This study adds to the literature on the typology of sibilant acoustics by examining the spectral dynamics of sibilants in Quebec French (/s, ʃ, z, ʒ/). ∼28 k word-initial, pre-vocalic tokens from more than 100 speakers are extracted from a large corpus of parliamentary speech (Milne, 2014). For each token, multitaper spectra (Reidy, 2013) over a 20 ms window are calculated at 17 equidistant points. A variety of acoustic measures, including segment duration and spectral moments, are reported. Preliminary results examining static measures reveal that the anterior sibilants have higher spectral speak (∼5700 Hz vs ∼4600 Hz for posterior ones), as expected; unlike in English, however, / s/ and /ʃ/ have similar average duration.