French Schwa Research Articles

Конфликтни зони между писмена норма и устна реч във френския език и свързаните с тях проблеми при преподаването на френско произношение на българи

Outlining the context of increased attention to linguistic issues in French society, the article introduces a number of concepts related to the definition of norm types in the French language, specifies nuances in the terminology adopted in the main grammars of the French language and in some new publications in the field of French phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics. Two phonetic phenomena (liaison and French schwa) have been outlined as conflict zones between the written norm and oral speech in the phonetic implementation of the graphic elements of the spelling system. Due to the substantial divergence between oral and written code in these phenomena, as well as in relation to the multitude of factors that intervene in deciding on their (non)realization, they are at the root of serious difficulties in learning French pronunciation. The article offers some tips for emphasizing their teaching.

Real-time intelligibility affects the realization of French word-final schwa

Speech variation has been hypothesized to reflect both speaker-internal influences of lexical access on production and adaptive modifications to make words more intelligible to the listener. The current study considers categorical and gradient variation in the production of word-final schwa in French as explained by lexical access processes, phonological, and/or listener-oriented influences on speech production, while controlling for other factors. To that end, native French speakers completed two laboratory production tasks. In Experiment 1, speakers produced 32 monosyllabic words varying in lexical frequency in a word list production task with no listener feedback. In Experiment 2, speakers produced the same words to an interlocutor while completing a map task varying listener comprehension success across trials: in half the trials, the words are correctly perceived by the interlocutor; in half, there is misunderstanding. Results reveal that speakers are more likely to produce word-final schwa when there is explicit pressure to be intelligible to the interlocutor. Also, when schwa is produced, it is longer preceding a consonant-initial word. Taken together, findings suggest that there are both phonological and clarity-oriented influences on word-final schwa realization in French.

Second language learners acquire reduced word forms just like they acquire full forms

Abstract We investigated the effect of auditory exposure on the recognition of full (i.e., canonical) and reduced (i.e., with weakened or deleted sounds) word forms by beginner second language (L2) learners. We taught three participant groups the same French schwa words. One group was trained only on the full (i.e., with schwa) forms, one group on the reduced forms (i.e., without schwa) only, and one group on both the full and reduced forms of each word. We then tested participants’ recognition of both forms in an auditory lexical decision task. We found that participants’ accuracy for a form was proportional to the exposure they received at training for that form. Both participants’ groups trained on one form recognized the untrained form in about a third of the trials. We conclude that exposure is a crucial factor in learning L2 reduced forms and that listeners use both retrieval from storage and goodness of fit (including reconstruction) mechanisms, in the same way for full as for reduced forms.

Generalizing French Schwa Deletion: the Role of Indexed Constraints*

Indexed constraints (like cophonologies) increase a grammar’s fit to seen data, but do they hurt the grammar’s ability to generalize to unseen data? We focus on French schwa deletion, an optional process whose rate of application is modulated by both phonological and lexical factors, and we propose three indexed constraint learners in the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) framework. Using data from Racine (2008), we test the ability of four learners to capture existing patterns and generalize to unseen data: three learners and a control MaxEnt learner without indexed constraint induction. The Indexed constraint learners indeed lead to better fit to the training data compared to the control. The resulting grammars are tested on a different schwa deletion dataset from Smith & Pater (2020). It is shown that indexed constraints do not lead to a drop in generalization to these data, and one of the indexation learners produces a grammar that predicts Smith & Pater’s data quite closely. We conclude that indexed constraints do not necessarily hurt a grammar’s ability to generalize to unseen data, while allowing the grammar to achieve a closer fit to training data.

Comparing MaxEnt and Noisy Harmonic Grammar

MaxEnt grammar is a probabilistic version of Harmonic Grammar in which the harmony scores of candidates are mapped onto probabilities. It has become the tool of choice for analyzing phonological phenomena involving probabilistic variation or gradient acceptability, but there is a competing proposal for making Harmonic Grammar probabilistic, Noisy Harmonic Grammar, in which variation is derived by adding random ‘noise’ to constraint weights. In this paper these grammar frameworks, and variants of them, are analyzed by reformulating them all in a format where noise is added to candidate harmonies, and the differences between frameworks lie in the distribution of this noise. This analysis reveals a basic difference between the models: in MaxEnt the relative probabilities of two candidates depend only on the difference in their harmony scores, whereas in Noisy Harmonic Grammar it also depends on the differences in the constraint violations incurred by the two candidates. This difference leads to testable predictions which are evaluated against data on variable realization of schwa in French (Smith & Pater 2020). The results support MaxEnt over Noisy Harmonic Grammar.

A corpus-based study of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French and what it teaches us about its phonological status

What is commonly considered as an epenthetic vowel can actually refer to at least two different realities: phonological epenthesis or phonetic excrescence. French schwa, noted [ә], is a vowel alternating with zero and limited to unstressed syllables that can appear word-internally or word-finally. This paper presents an extensive description of the distribution of word-final schwa in Standard French in order to shed light on its nature: is it an intrusive vowel or a full epenthetic vowel? To that extent, three large corpora of French containing more than 110 hours of speech were used to establish the presence of word-final schwa as a function of sociolinguistics, orthography, phonotactics and phonetics. Our conclusions are that word-final schwa is impacted by speech style, gender, orthography, phonotactics (i.e., the number of adjacent consonants and their sonority profile), and the phonological properties of the codas. However, speech rate does not impact word-final schwa realization. The specific results lead us to suggest that word-final schwa in Standard French shares similarities with intrusive vowels but ultimately behaves like a legit epenthetic vowel.

Not only size matters: limits to the Law of Three Consonants in French phonology

Grammont’s (1914) influential Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Later works have shown that schwa presence is also sensitive to the nature of the consonants involved, at least at the word and phrase levels. However the LTC is still generally considered as accurate under its original formulation to describe schwa-zero alternations at the stem level. The goal of the paper is to test whether the LTC should be relaxed even in this context. The paper presents two studies using judgment data to compare the behavior of schwa in derived words (stem-level phonology) and in inflected words (word-level phonology). The results of the two studies show that the nature of consonants involved in the CC_C sequence plays a role at both stem and word levels. Moreover, the same phonotactic asymmetries among consonant clusters are found in both contexts. The data therefore support a weaker version of the stem-level vs. word-level divide than what is usually assumed for French. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a modeling study showing that a constraint-based grammar with the same phonotactic constraints across stem- and word-level phonologies provides a better fit to the judgment data from Study 1 and Study 2 than a grammar with different phononotactic constraints in the two morphosyntactic domains. The paper also replicates a number of earlier findings on the role of morphosyntactic domains, clash avoidance, and dialectal variation in schwa-zero alternations.

Against the Law of Three Consonants in French: Evidence from Judgment Data

Grammont's Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Although schwa presence has been shown to be sensitive not only to cluster size but also to the nature of consonants in post-lexical phonology, the LTC is still considered as accurate to describe schwa-zero alternations in lexical phonology. The paper uses judgment data from French speakers in France and Switzerland to compare the behavior of schwa in derived words (lexical phonology) and inflected words (post-lexical phonology). The results show that schwa-zero alternations are conditioned not only by cluster size but also by cluster type in lexical phonology. Moreover, the same phonotactic asymmetries among consonant clusters are found in lexical and post-lexical phonologies. The data therefore support a weaker version of the lexical-phonology hypothesis than what is usually assumed for French. Lexical and post-lexical phonologies do not require different phonotactic constraints but only different weights for the same constraints.

La production du schwa par des apprenants suédophones de FLE

The purpose of this paper is to examine the pronunciation of French schwa by Swedish learners of French as a foreign language. The study investigates how the learners deal with schwa deletion (mute e), which is a very frequent phonological process in spoken French, and also how the learners pronounce the schwa when it is not deleted.
 Thirty learners participated in the first part of the study. Their task was to read and repeat isolated terms from two lists of words and to read a short text. The second part of the study consists of dialogues between ten learners.
 The results show that many learners have difficulties in pronouncing French schwa correctly. In fact, they often pronounce it as [e] or [ɛ] (e.g. revanche pronounced [ʁevɑ̃ʃ] instead of [ʁəvɑ̃ʃ]). This problem often persists for very advanced learners, even though learners who have spent at least six months in a French-speaking country generally have better results than those who have spent less time in the target culture. However, there is a wide variation among learners and also from one word to another. As to schwa deletion, the results show that the learners delete very few schwas. They make more schwa deletions in conversation than when they read a text, but compared to native French speakers (Lyche 2016), the learners make considerably fewer schwa deletions. Moreover, the learners make very few incorrect schwa deletions, unlike what has been observed among Dutch learners (Nouveau et Detey 2007).

How much does orthography influence the processing of reduced word forms? Evidence from novel-word learning about French schwa deletion.

This study examines the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms. For this purpose, we compared the impact of phonological variation with the impact of spelling-sound consistency on the processing of words that may be produced with or without the vowel schwa. Participants learnt novel French words in which the vowel schwa was present or absent in the first syllable. In Experiment 1, the words were consistently produced without schwa or produced in a variable manner (i.e., sometimes produced with and sometimes produced without schwa). In Experiment 2, words were always produced in a consistent manner, but an orthographic exposure phase was included in which words that were produced without schwa were either spelled with or without the letter <e>. Results from naming and eye-tracking tasks suggest that both phonological variation and spelling-sound consistency influence the processing of spoken novel words. However, the influence of phonological variation outweighs the effect of spelling-sound consistency. Our findings therefore suggest that the influence of orthography on the processing of reduced word forms is relatively small.

Inter- and intra-speaker variation in French schwa

Quantitative constraint-based theories of optionality typically aim to model the frequency with which an individual speaker’s grammar maps one input onto various output forms. But existing studies in this area use population-level frequency data as a proxy for the frequencies produced by an individual speaker’s grammar. This practice is problematic for three reasons. First, population-level variation could result from aggregation over individuals with differing categorical behavior, not individual variation at all. Second, some theories predict that individuals with identical relative constraint rankings/weights can produce those outputs with different frequencies, while others predict uniform frequencies across speakers; these prediction cannot be tested without individual-level data. Third, if indeed individuals differ in their output frequencies, population-level averages may disguise true patterns of individual variation. This paper addresses these shortcomings through a corpus study of optional schwa deletion in French. We find that individual speakers do in fact show variable omission of schwa. We also find variation between speakers in the frequency of schwa’s appearance. Taken together, these results confirm that for French schwa, formal theories are correct to ascribe variation to a single speaker’s grammar, and they favor theories that decouple the means of producing variation from the account of output frequency.

Producing and recognizing words with two pronunciation variants: Evidence from novel schwa words

This study examined the lexical representations and psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the production and recognition of novel words with two pronunciation variants in French. Participants first learned novel schwa words (e.g., /ʃənyk/), which varied in their alternating status (i.e., whether these words were learned with one or two variants) and, for alternating words, in the frequency of their variants. They were then tested in picture-naming (free or induced) and recognition memory tasks (i.e., deciding whether spoken items were learned during the experiment or not). Results for free naming show an influence of variant frequency on responses, more frequent variants being produced more often. Moreover, our data show an effect of the alternating status of the novel words on naming latencies, with longer latencies for alternating than for nonalternating novel words. These induced naming results suggest that both variants are stored as lexical entries and compete during the lexeme selection process. Results for recognition show an effect of variant frequency on reaction times and no effect of variant type (i.e., schwa versus reduced variant). Taken together, our findings suggest that participants both comprehend and produce novel French schwa words using two lexical representations, one for each variant.

Locality and globality in phonological variation

This paper explores the consequences of Harmonic Serialism (HS), a derivational variant of OT, for local and global phonological variation. Variation is local when each locus within a single form may vary independently, as in French schwa deletion. Variation is global when all loci within a single form must covary, as in labial (de)voicing in Warao. Within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) with parallel evaluation, only global variation is predicted to exist. In this paper, I show how implementing a multiple-rankings theory of phonological variation within HS accounts for both local and global variation.

Phonetic reduction versus phonological deletion of French schwa: Some methodological issues

A categorical phonological process of deletion is traditionally assumed to account for the alternation of schwa with zero in French. This process is assumed to result in two discrete outputs: forms with schwa (i.e., schwa variants) and forms without schwa (i.e., non-schwa variants). However, the two studies we present here suggest a more complex picture. In the first study, we investigate the phonetic variability of schwa in a large number of occurrences of schwa variants and find that schwa, like other segments in French, undergoes phonetic reduction. As a consequence, some tokens without schwa in connected speech may be the result of a process of gradual phonetic reduction rather than the result of a categorical process of alternation. In the second study, we examine the perception of schwa word tokens extracted from connected speech. We show that deciding whether a token was produced with or without the schwa is not always possible. Furthermore, listeners rely on other types of cues than acoustic ones in order to make their judgements (i.e., speech rate, word length and segmental context). These findings have important theoretical and methodological implications that must be taken into account in the empirical study of French schwa alternation.

Is there only one “fenêtre” in the production lexicon? On-line evidence on the nature of phonological representations of pronunciation variants for French schwa words

This study examines whether the production of words with two phonological variants involves single or multiple lexical phonological representations. Three production experiments investigated the roles of the relative frequencies of the two pronunciation variants of French words with schwa: the schwa variant (e.g., ▪) and the reduced variant (e.g., ▪). In two naming tasks and in a symbol–word association learning task, variants with higher relative frequencies were produced faster. This suggests that the production lexicon keeps a frequency count for each variant and hence that schwa words are represented in the production lexicon with two different lexemes. In addition, the advantage for schwa variants over reduced variants in the naming tasks but not in the learning task and the absence of a variant relative frequency effect for schwa variants produced in isolation support the hypothesis that context affects the variants’ lexical activation and modulates the effect of variant relative frequency.

Factors influencing French schwa deletion and duration: A corpus‐based study

Numerous factors have been advanced to account for the alternance of schwa with zero in French, such as lexical frequency, sonority, syllable structure, phonotactic constraints, etc. ... In the present study we use a recently developed statistical modeling technique, mixed effects models with crossed random effects, to capture the relative contributions of multiple linguistic factors on both, schwa deletion and schwa's physical duration when present. This study is based on the analysis of 4300 occurrences, extracted from the production of more than 300 speakers in a broadcast corpus. The implications of these findings for the debate on the nature of the processes involved in schwa deletion as well as for the nature of lexical representations will be discussed.

The preservation of schwa in the converging phonological system of Frenchville (PA) French

The phonological system of the French of Frenchville, Pennsylvania (USA) demonstrates a dramatic case of transfer in the latest (and last) generation of bilingual French–English speakers: the mid front round vowels, [œ] and [ø], have often been replaced by the English rhoticized schwa as found in the word sir. However, French schwa, which is arguably phonetically non-distinct from the mid front round vowels, does not participate fully in this merger. This result is unexpected given both the phonetic identity of schwa and [ø], and the fact that our speakers are not literate in French and, as such, have no access to the differential orthographic representations manifest between schwa and the mid front round vowels. The data argue strongly that schwa is, in some sense, “real” for these speakers. Based on a phonetic analysis of the vowels under consideration, we argue that transfer between two sound systems cannot be perceived as a simple case of phonetic replacement. Instead, transfer or convergence with English must be viewed as a systemic process that preserves contrast in unexpected ways. In the case at hand, the data suggest that the traditional separation between the phonetic and phonological levels of grammar cannot be maintained as each level contributes to both provoking merger and maintaining contrast in bilingual speech.

Sociolinguistic variation in southern French schwa

This article examines the differing degrees to which young male and female speakers are apparently participating in a process of linguistic change currently taking place in southern French. Previous research suggests that younger females in southern France are adopting the treatment of schwa characteristic of the northern standard variety; but no study of linguistic change in southern French has yet been carried out through a direct, variationist comparison of young male and female speakers. We analyze here the linguistic contexts in which schwa is most susceptible to penetration by the northern French norm. Much research on the differential treatment by male and female speakers of variable linguistic forms has shown that young males tend to resist the introduction of supraregional linguistic forms, while females adopt them. As well as discussing new evidence on a Frenchspecific research issue, we also examine the crosslinguistic significance of the French findings. Further, we attempt to shed new light on the behavior of male and female speakers in relation to national and regional linguistic forms, and to reconsider some issues associated with the definition of standard languages.

Articulatory characteristics of French consonants are maintained after the loss of schwa

The optional loss of schwa in French generates consonant clusters. Thus de rôle [d■rol] can be produced as d’role [drol] and is thought to become homophonous with drôle [drol]. This study compared articulatory and acoustic properties of [d] in these sequences in order to determine whether [d] maintains, after the loss of schwa, certain characteristics of the isolation form de. The sequences were inserted in a carrier sentence and repeated 20 times by three French speakers. Consonants were compared in terms of amount and location of linguopalatal contact (measured with EPG), their acoustic duration, and frequency of lenition (absence of closure). Preliminary results for one subject show that despite the complete disappearance of schwa, the [d] ind ’rôle has some of the same characteristics as the one in de rôle as opposed to drôle: longer duration, greater and more anterior linguopalatal contact, less lenition. These results suggest that the loss of schwa does not lead to resyllabification of [d] with either the preceding or following syllable, but rather that the consonant maintains the characteristic properties of the citation form. The significance of this result is that lexical distinctions are maintained in production, despite the apparent phonological neutralization induced by schwa loss.

The new stability of unstable –e in French

AbstractMuch recent work (e.g. Hansen 1994) is demonstrating that French schwa is becoming stable in many contexts where it formerly deleted freely. In this paper, I expand on Hansen's study of the new stability of schwa, extending consideration to the lexicalized conditioning of the stability as indicated in four contemporary pronouncing dictionaries of Standard French. This increasing stability also provides evidence for a reanalysis of schwa as underlying /œ/; the implications of this analysis for the distinction between lexical and post-lexical rules are briefly explored.