Long-distance anticipatory vowel-to-vowel assimilatory effects in French and Japanese

Faith CHIU, Lauren FROMONT, Kwing Lok Albert LEE, Yi XU

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapters

Abstract

This paper examines language-specific differences in anticipatory vowel-to-vowel coarticulation using two non-stress languages. Native speakers of Standard French (n=6) and Tokyo Japanese (n=5) served as subjects to a production study. To investigate possible long-distance effects between and beyond adjacent vowels, linguistic material consisting of /ba.bV/ and /ba.ba.bV/ was embedded within a carrier sentence in each language. The word-final trigger vowel (V) is /a/, /i/ or /u/. Acoustic analysis of continuous F₁ and F₂ trajectories as well as single-point formant measurements revealed opposite patterns in the two languages. Strong anticipatory effects in vowels up to 2 preceding syllables were observed in French. However, Japanese displayed few statistically significant anticipatory effects in any vowel preceding any trigger. We interpret the results as an indication that there are two rather different types of contextual phonetic variability. We also assert not all phonetic assimilatory effects in “coarticulation” are due to articulatory overlap. Copyright © 2015 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
Editors The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015
Place of PublicationGlasgow, UK
PublisherThe University of Glasgow
ISBN (Electronic)9780852619414
Publication statusPublished - 2015

Citation

Chiu, F., Fromont, L., Lee, A., & Xu, Y. (2015). Long-distance anticipatory vowel-to-vowel assimilatory effects in French and Japanese. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Retrieved from https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/proceedings.html

Keywords

  • Vowel-to-vowel coarticulation
  • Contextual variation
  • Assimilatory effects
  • French
  • Japanese

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