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Free keywords:
lexical probability, prosody, French, corpus research,
acoustic reduction, speech rate
Abstract:
The present study shows that [t] consonants are affected by
probabilistic factors in a syllable-timed language as French, and
in spontaneous as well as in journalistic speech. Study 1 showed
a word bigram frequency effect in spontaneous French, but its
exact nature depended on the corpus on which the probabilistic
measures were based. Study 2 investigated journalistic speech
and showed an effect of the joint frequency of the test word and
its following word. We discuss the possibility that these probabilistic
effects are due to the speaker’s planning of upcoming
words, and to the speaker’s adaptation to the listener’s needs.
