In rapid connected speech, we can observe the forms of 3 tenses reduced to the same segmental string [je ta]: (1) Il est à l'hôpital [je ta lopital] (he is at the hospital), (2) Il était à l'hôpital [je tεa …] → [je ta …] (he was at the hospital), (3) Il a été à l'hopital [jae tea …] [je ta …] (he has been at the hospital), or he went to the hospital. Even without contexts, these sentences are not ambiguous, because the intonation is falling for (1) [je ta], it is rising for (2) [je ta], and it is high on both syllables for (3). We will see that these patterns are not conditioned by the tenses, but by the placement of stress, the vocalic elision and the nature of the boundaries. The basic intonation contours are the same in slow and fast speech, but in slow speech the intonation contour is less modulated. In fast speech, where the segmental ambiguity makes the intonation contour distinctive, it is exaggerated, with greater variation in found. freq. (FF). In this paper I will describe the nature of this fast speech phenomenon and present data on the acoustic changes in duration, intensity and FF involved.