EXPLORING CONSONANTAL VARIATION IN FRENCH-ARABIC CODE SWITCHING SPEECH: THE CASE OF GEMINATION
Résumé
Code switching (CS) is the practice of moving back and forth between two languages in the same passage. This paper investigates consonantal variation in an 8-hour corpus of spontaneous code-switched
French-Algerian Arabic speech. The study focuses on production variation in Arabic geminate consonants for which Arabic has a phonological opposition with simple consonants. This may influence bilinguals’ production in French where this opposition does not exist. Experiments are realized with the help of automatic speech alignment authorizing simple and geminate pronunciation variants. The alignment system makes use of Arabic acoustic models which also cover all consonants of French, permitting investigation of simple/geminate variation in both languages. By associating the alignment results with acoustic measurements of con-onant variation, this study shows that, the variation affects both French and Arabic simple consonants in code-switched speech with an average geminate variation of the simple consonants of 21.2% for French and 22.4% for Arabic.
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)