Reduction of obstruent-liquid-schwa clusters in casual French
This study investigated pronunciation variants of word-final obstruent-liquid-schwa (OLS) clusters in
casual French and the variables predicting the absence of the phonemes in these clusters. In a dataset of 291 noun tokens extracted from a corpus
of casual conversations, we observed that in 80.7% of the tokens, at least one phoneme was absent and that in no less than 15.5% the whole cluster was absent (e.g., /mis/ for ministre). Importantly, the probability of a phoneme being absent was higher if
the following phoneme was absent as well. These data show that reduction can affect several phonemes at once and is not restricted to just a handful of (function) words. Moreover, our results
demonstrate that the absence of each single phoneme is affected by the speaker's tendency to increase ease
of articulation and to adapt a word's pronunciation variant to the time available.
Share this page