Coronal stop lenition in French and Spanish: Electropalatographic evidence

Abstract

Lenition of voiced and, to a lesser extent, voiceless stops is widely attested in Western Romance languages. In Spanish, utterance-initial voiced stops as well as those following nasals alternate with approximants in intervocalic position. Acoustic and articulatory studies have revealed factors that condition phonetic weakening. In contrast, very little is known about stop weakening in French. In this paper, using electropalatography, we provide articulatory evidence for the lenition of /t d/ in both Spanish and French. Data obtained from seven Spanish-speaking and four French-speaking participants reveal that, in both languages, /d/ is produced with less linguopalatal contact than /t/, and these differences are strongly conditioned by the position within the utterance or word. The languages differ, however, in the degree of /d/ lenition as well as in some of the contextual conditioning factors. Overall, our results, which should be interpreted with some caution given the number of speakers and the balance of the stimuli set, show that French resembles other Romance languages in its phonetic patterns of lenition, differing mainly in the degree of weakening.

Pathways to depalatalization of the palatal nasal in Quebec and hexagonal French: An EPG study

“…Given the scarcity of published articulatory studies of French, and of Quebec French in particular, this allows us to show how the patterns observed for palatal nasals are consistent with other phonological processes reported in each variety. As we will see, the variable weakening of the palatal nasal to a velar nasal in Quebec French is consistent with other weakening processes that we have previously documented in either European or Quebec French syllable/word-finally including (i) differences in coronal stop lenition (lesser contact in the production of /t/ and, especially, /d/ in Quebec French; Colantoni et al, 2022); (ii) greater contact in the production of /n/ before alveolars (e.g., bonne tablette) by the European speakers and speaker-specific differences in the degree of the /n/-velar stop sequences (e.g., bonne casquette) compared to Quebec French (Steele et al, 2019); and (iii) reduction in anterior contact in coda versus onset-/l/ in Quebec but not European French (Colantoni et al, 2023).…”

“…In Quebec French, we predict a similar position-based asymmetry with a proportion of lenited variants word-finally. Our hypothesis for Quebec French is based on our previous EPG studies (see Introduction), where we found greater lenition in Quebec French including in the production of /d/ (Colantoni et al, 2022), and in the degree of contact reduction in /l/ (Colantoni et al, 2023).…”

“…In parallel to the possible greater allophonic variation in Quebec French, if we contextualize the results here vis-à-vis those from other studies that we have conducted on various consonantal phenomena using data from the same corpus highlighted in the Introduction, a pattern of possibly greater lenition in Quebec French consonant production begins to emerge. Specifically, we have previously found lesser contact in the production of /t/ and, especially, /d/ word finally in Quebec French (Colantoni et al, 2022); in across-word /n/consonant sequences, lesser contact in the production of /n/ before alveolars by the Quebec French speakers (Steele et al, 2019); and with respect to the degree of contact reduction in coda versus onset-/l/, the presence of reduction in anterior contact in Quebec but not European French as well as more consistent reduction of posterior contact in the former variety (Colantoni et al, 2023).…”

Differential substitution: a contrastive hierarchy account

“…There is evidence that [continuant] is high-ranked in EF that emerges when we compare it with QF concerning the process of spirantization. The QF stop /d/ and /t/ lenite intervocalically, but they do not in EF (Colantoni et al, 2021). This differential behavior results from a difference in the ranking, as the feature does not seem to be active in either EF or QF.…”

“…Thus, the target sounds for this phonological process are [+strident, +posterior], which is consistent with both [strident] and [posterior] being active in QF. Colantoni et al (2021) talk about coronal stop lenition using electropalatography data on two EF and two QF speakers. Interestingly, there was a significant difference between the two dialect groups in which the QF speakers showed significantly more lenition (i.e., less contact) for both /d/ and /t/, though the effect was greater for /d/ than for the EF speakers.…”