Coarticulatory effects at prosodic boundaries: some acoustic results

Acoustic data are presented from a prosodic database containing data from 3 French speakers. The prosodic boundaries examined are the Utterance, the Intonational Phrase, the Accentual Phrase, and the Word. The aim is to study the interaction of coarticulatory effects with prosodic effects. The vowel /a/ before the prosodic boundary and the consonants /b d I f s 5/ after the prosodic boundary are examined. It is found that the vowel duration is greatly affected by the strength of the prosodic boundary, but consonant duration less so. The duration of the fricative consonants is more stable than the stop consonants. Formant values suggest that /a/ is lower and more back the stronger the prosodic boundary, and that the vowel is more likely to reach its low target following a bilabial consonant /b f/. Based on an examination of formant values, the velar stop /I/ appears to have much variability in the front-back dimension. Finally, there is a strong negative correlation between duration and mean velocity of the formant transition, and this effect is strongly related to the strength of the prosodic boundary.