Contribution of automatic speech processing to the study of Northern/Southern French

This study focuses on the pronunciation of oral mid vowels and nasal vowels in Northern and Southern French. It is based on the investigation of a large corpus (30 h, over 100 speakers) of spoken French, enabled by recent advances in the area of automatic speech processing. The realisation of oral mid vowels is investigated through two approaches using automatic phone alignment. The first approach explores formant measurements whereas the second one investigates pronunciation variants such as /ɔ/∼/œ/∼/o/. The latter approach, simulating a categorical approach, was also used to question the realisation/deletion of schwas and the realisation of nasal vowels as sequences including a potentially oral vowel and a nasal consonant. In this article, five features are being addressed: /ɔ/ fronting in the North, /o/ opening within a subset of words (e.g. spelled with ‘au’ or ‘ô’), /ɛ/ closing within another subset of words (e.g. ending in -ais or -ait), schwa realisation and nasal vowel denasalisation in the South. The results of the two approaches to oral vowel quality converge, showing that these variables contrast Northern and Southern French. The contrast is sharper regarding the /O/ archiphoneme than the /E/ archiphoneme. It is also sharper regarding nasal vowels than the schwa. These empirical data are valuable in affording insight into sociophonetics and corpus phonology.