Comparing praat and snack formant measurements on two large corpora of northern and southern French

We compare formant frequency measurements between two authoritative tools (Praat and Snack), two large corpora (of face-to-face and telephone speech) and two French varieties (northern and southern). There are both an evaluation of formant tracking (as well as related filtering techniques) and an application to find out salient pronunciation traits. Despite differences between Praat and Snack with regard to telephone speech (Praat yielding greater F1 values), results seem to converge to suggest that northern and southern French varieties mainly differ in the second formant of the open /O/. /O/ fronting in northern French (with F2 values greater than 1100 Hz for males and 1200 Hz for females) is by far the most discriminating feature provided by decision trees applied to oral vowel formants.