Abstract
This study examined how monolingual French speakers produced the /d/–/t/ distinction in stressed and unstressed syllable-initial stops preceded by a voiceless phone (/s/). Syllables were embedded in sentences. Sentence durations and voicing-related differences in durations of preceding vowel, /s/, stop closure, and VOT were calculated and analyzed as a function of the stress condition separately for each speaker (stressed syllables spoken at normal speaking rate, unstressed syllables produced at normal speaking rate). Preliminary analyses reveal that the vowel and the voiceless fricative preceding the unstressed target syllables were longer than the vowel and the fricative preceding the stressed target syllables. Closure durations were also longer in the unstressed condition than in the stressed condition. However, voicing-related duration differences were not systematically affected by stress. Finally, the voicing of /s/ (/s/ before /d/) and of /d/ closures, which occurred frequently in the stress condition, occurred less frequently in the unstressed condition for most of the speakers. The perceptual consequences of such results remain to be investigated.
Published Version
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