Acceso usuarios
Yaru Wu, Ioana Chitoran, Ioanna Vasilescu, Lori Lamel, Martine Adda-Decker
This study focuses on voicing alternation in French and Spanish stops, i.e. ca-nonically voiceless /ptk/ realized as voiced [bdg] or canonically voiced /bdg/ realized as voice-less [ptk]. Forced alignment with voicing variants was used to annotate large speech corpora in French and in Spanish. The following factors of variation were examined: position in the word, preceding and following context, duration of the stop and that of surrounding phones, speech rate, part of speech, and the weight of these factors on voicing alternation. The voicing nature of the stops (whether the stop is phonologically voiceless /ptk/ or voiced /bdg/) turns out to be the factor that contributes the most to the prediction of voicing alternations among all investi-gated factors for Spanish, according to the random forest model. Whereas for French, the same factor comes after contextual and acoustic factors in the ranking. These results suggest that stop voicing patterns differently in these two Romance languages, although they both have a similar voiced-voiceless phonological contrast.
