The phrasing of dislocations in French: Comparing spontaneous speech and reading

Spoken French makes extensive use of dislocations, where one phrase, usually the subject, is set off from the main clause, and within that clause, a pronoun is used. Previous findings are conflicting about the strength of the prosodic boundary, if any, between the dislocation and the main clause. We compare productions of dislocations in conversation and in identical sentences read aloud. Both spontaneous and read tokens showed higher f0 in the syllable preceding the putative boundary, although the difference was smaller in spontaneous speech. Durational variation was estimated using two methods to control for speaker and item variation; no lengthening was found in spontaneous speech, but it was substantial in reading. These results contrast with previous suggestions [7] that lengthening may mark this boundary more robustly than f0. The variation between speech styles suggests that all dislocations cannot be analysed by the same prosodic unit. [Support from NSF BCS-1251134.]