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LINGUIST List 19.1425

Mon Apr 28 2008

Qs: Reference Values for French Oral Vowels

Editor for this issue: Catherine Adams <catherinlinguistlist.org>



        1.    Damien Hall, Reference Values for French Oral Vowels

Message 1: Reference Values for French Oral Vowels
Date: 28-Apr-2008
From: Damien Hall <halldjbabel.ling.upenn.edu>
Subject: Reference Values for French Oral Vowels
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I'm looking for a set of reference values for French oral vowels, including:

- F1, F2 and F3
- crucially, values for /A/ (back a, as in _pâtes_ 'pasta').

The /a/ ~ /A/ opposition is maintained less and less in European French, and therefore many modern sets of reference values don't include /A/ any more, but the opposition is still very much realised, for example, in Canadian French,and in some sectors of the population (older and / or rural people, for example) in France. I'm studying an area of France (Normandy) where the opposition is maintained, so I need to show where /A/ would fall in an idealised vowel space, by opposition to front /a/. The most recent data I have been able to find that include /A/ date from 1965 (Delattre), when 'standard French' was perhaps more widely considered still to include /A/. For the other oral vowels, I have been using Gendrot and Adda-Decker (2005) and references therein.

What's more, I need F3 in order to normalise the reference vowels in Bark. Even the data I have found that include /A/ only include F1 and F2: I suppose that's because instrumental phonetic science was much less developed then and F3 was not often measured.

If anyone can help, I'll post a summary of responses. Many thanks!

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania


Delattre, Pierre. 1965 [1981]. An acoustic and articulatory study of vowel reduction in four languages. In: Malmberg, Bertil (ed.). 1981. Pierre Delattre: Studies in Comparative Phonetics. Heidelberg, Germany: Julius Groos, Verlag. 63-94.

Gendrot, Cedric and Adda-Decker, Martine. 2005. Impact of duration on F1/F2 values of oral vowels: an automatic analysis of large broadcast news corpora in French and German. Interspeech 2005, Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Portugal.

Linguistic Field(s): Phonetics

Subject Language(s): French (fra)

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