Tonal Alignment Distinctions Between Standard French and Vaudois Swiss French

This paper shows that measures of text-to-tune alignment (i.e. analyses of f0 target points in relation to segmental landmarks) are able to shed light on significant prosodic differences in read speech between a group of six speakers of standard French from Northern France and a group of six speakers of Swiss French from the Vaud canton. The tonal targets measured in this study seemed to be anchored in different locations depending on the dialectal group. In the Vaudois group, initial rises tended to occur later while final rises tended to occur earlier in the target syllables. In addition, the low “elbow” point preceding the final rise was realized in the penultimate syllable more often in the Vaudois group than in the standard French group. These minute differences show that dialectal distinctions in a language whose main prosodic structure utilizes the Accentual Phrase can be encoded through tonal alignment.