Schwa Realization in French: Using Automatic Speech Processing to Study Phonological and Socio-linguistic Factors in Large Corpora
Résumé
The study investigates different factors influencing schwa real-
ization in French: phonological factors, speech style, gender,
and socio-professional status. Three large corpora, two of pub-
lic journalistic speech (ESTER and ETAPE) and one of casual
speech (NCCFr) are used. The absence/presence of schwa is
automatically decided via forced alignment, which has a suc-
cessful performance rate of 95%. Only polysyllabic words in-
cluding a potential schwa in the word-initial syllable are studied
in order to control for variability in word structure and position.
The effect of the left context, grouped into classes of a word
final vowel or final consonant or a pause, is studied. Words
preceded by a vowel (V#) tend to favor schwa deletion. Inter-
estingly, words preceded by a consonant or a pause have similar
behaviors: speakers tend to maintain schwa in both contexts.
As can be expected, the more casual the speech, the more fre-
quently schwa is dropped. Males tend to delete more schwas
than females, and journalists are more likely to delete schwa
than politicians. These results suggest that beyond phonology,
other factors such as gender, style and socio-professional status
influence the realization of schwa.