The production of the stop voicing distinction in French at normal and rapid speaking rates

Abstract

This study examined how monolingual Parisian French speakers produced the stop voicing distinction at two different speaking rates (normal, rapid) in two different phonetic contexts (between vowels, between voiceless-fricatives). Results showed that all the acoustic correlates of the voicing distinction under study (syllable-initial: VOT, closure duration and closure voicing; syllable final stops: preceding vowel duration, closure duration, closure voicing and release) were shorter in the rapid speaking rate condition than in the normal speaking rate condition. Furthermore, voicing-related differences were also smaller in the rapid speaking rate condition than in the normal speaking rate condition to a degree that varied with each acoustic correlate and each phonetic context. Overall, similar patterns of voicing-related duration differences and closure voicing differences were found in the normal and rapid speaking rate conditions, but the perceptual salience of small voicing-conditioned duration differences remains to be investigated.