Acoustic and articulatory evidence for the phonological status of liaison consonants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
French liaison consonants (LC) are a special class of word-final segments whose realization depends on a combination of phonological, lexical, and syntactic factors. Most previous analyses viewed LCs as coda consonants realized only before vowel-initial words. Because of their special status as syntactically and lexically conditioned, an interesting question is whether LCs exhibit typical acoustic and articulatory characteristics of word-final consonants. This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation of LCs in adjective+noun pairings in Quebec French, using electromagnetic articulography to collect kinematic data. Compared to typical coda and onset consonants, liaison consonants were found to exhibit smaller magnitude release gestures, and in some cases LC closure gestures were more similar to those of onsets than codas. Unlike coda consonants, LCs did not induce gestural shortening or laxing (F1 raising) of the preceding vowel. Hence our results indicate that, although LCs have been analyzed as word-final consonants, they exhibit neither typical coda-like or onset-like acoustic and articulatory properties. These results are important because they show that syntactically conditioned lexical phonology can result in non-canonical articulatory patterns, and hence speak to the need for models of production to incorporate both lexical representations and syntactic context as factors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".