Volume 77, Issue 4

Background/Aims: In French, the size of a focus constituent is not reliably marked through pitch accent assignment as in many stress accent languages. While it has been argued that the distribution of lower-level prosodic boundaries plays a role, this is at best a weak cue to focus, leaving open the question of whether other marking strategies are available. In this study, we assess whether the right edge of a contrastive focus constituent is marked by differences in prosodic boundary strength. Methods: We elicited utterances with target words in six combinations of focus and syntactic contexts using an interactive production task. Results: The results show that if a given location is realized as an accentual phrase boundary in an all-focus context, then it is realized as an intermediate phrase boundary when it coincides with the right edge of a narrow-focus constituent. A location that is an intermediate phrase boundary in an all-focus context, however, remains unchanged under narrow focus. Conclusion: These findings suggest that focus constituents are constrained to align with a minimum prosodic domain size in French (i.e., the intermediate phrase), and that French does not rely on a general strategy of prosodic enhancement for marking focus.

Background/Aims: This study investigates a possible merger in the early stages between /i:/ and /y:/ among young speakers in Gothenburg, Sweden. Methods: (1) A large-scale online perception experiment testing listeners’ abilities to identify the two vowels and (2) acoustic analysis of 705 vowels from 19 speakers. Results: The perception study shows that listeners classify the horizontally centralized /y:/ as /i:/, both in isolated vowel items and in items containing the full word. This indicates that /y:/ is moving into the perceptual space of /i:/. Listeners also classify the unmerged /y:/ as /i:/ when listening to [y:] in isolation, indicating that lip rounding is a perceptually weak feature, for this centralized vowel, in this variety. The acoustic analysis shows that /i:/ tends to be produced as [ɨ:], and that there is no acoustic difference between /i:/ and /y:/ in measurements correlated with the first two formants, i.e. lip rounding is the most important distinctive feature. Conclusion: Results point in the direction of an incipient vowel merger, following a merger-by-approximation model. These results indicate a lack of perceptual strength of an articulatory feature in the disappearing phoneme, namely lip rounding, and the consequent perceptual similarities between the horizontally centralized [ɨ:] and /y:/.

The present study examined vowel-to-vowel (VV) coarticulation in backness affecting mid vowels /e/ and /o/ in 36 Spanish nonwords produced by 20 native speakers of Spanish, aged 19–50 years (mean = 30.7; SD = 8.2). Examination of second formant frequency showed substantial carryover coarticulation throughout the data set, while anticipatory coarticulation was minimal and of shorter duration. Furthermore, the effect of stress on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation was investigated and found to vary by direction. In the anticipatory direction, small coarticulatory changes were relatively stable regardless of stress, particularly for target /e/, while in the carryover direction, a hierarchy of stress emerged wherein the greatest coarticulation occurred between stressed triggers and unstressed targets, less coarticulation was observed between unstressed triggers and unstressed targets, and the least coarticulation occurred between unstressed triggers with stressed targets. The results of the study augment and refine previously available knowledge about vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in Spanish and expand cross-linguistic understanding of the effect of stress on the magnitude and direction of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation.