La liaison dans la parole spontanée familière : explorations semi-automatiques de grands corpus (French Liaison in casual speech : automatic and manual investigations) [in French]

French Liaison in casual speech : automatic and manual investigations The realisation of the French Liaison is investigated in a large corpus of casual speech. Considering that casual speech gives rise to a large range of pronunciation variants and that overall temporal reduction increases (word and phone duration measurements) as compared to read and prepared speech, one may hypothesize that French liaison tends to be less productive in this kind of speaking style. We made use of automatic speech alignments to evaluate optional liaison realisations in potential liaison sites (word ending in a liaison consonant followed by a word-initial (semi)-vowel). Speech comes from the NCCFr corpus including 46 mostly young speakers with a total of more than 30 hours of speech. Realized liaisons were examined and measured for the most frequent liaison consonants (/z/, /n/ and /t/) as a function of a classification of the sites as mandatory, optional or forbidden with respect to liaison realization. An original contribution investigates liaison realization as a function of a speaker-dependent speech rate measure. MOTS-CLÉS : Variantes de prononciation, liaison, parole familière, réduction temporelle.