Lenition of voiced stops and, to a lesser extent, of voiceless stops is a widely attested process in Western Romance languages, both diachronically and synchronically. Of all these languages, the Spanish synchronic alternations have arguably received the most attention. In Spanish, phonologically voiced stops (see Mascaró, 1991, for discussion) are realized as approximants in all but absolute phrase-initial and post-nasal positions (/d/ is also realized as a stop after laterals) (Hualde, 2015). Variability is reported in word-final position with devoicing, fricativization, and deletion of /d/ in some varieties. Although devoicing and fricativization have been attested since the Middle Ages, deletion is a relatively more recent phenomenon, dating to the second half of the 15^th century, and exhibiting lexical effects (Ariza, 2012, p. 154). Of these three processes, fricativization is only observed in Peninsular Spanish (Antón, 1998; García Mouton & Molina Martos, 2015; González, 2002; Hualde & Eager, 2016; Molina Martos, 2016; Navarro Tomás, 1977; Pérez Castillejos, 2012). Devoicing and deletion appear to be more geographically widespread and have been reported to be conditioned by speech style; in particular, deletion is present in informal speech (Hualde & Eager, 2016; Navarro Tomás, 1977, §102; see Molina Martos, 2016, for a distribution of variants in the province of Madrid) and seemingly absent from read speech (González, 2002; Pérez Castillejos, 2012). More importantly for the present study, two additional factors condition this process: deletion is more frequent in absolute word-final position than within a phrase (Navarro Tomás, 1977, §102; see Hualde & Eager, 2016, for experimental data), and conditioned by the specific lexical item. Frequent deletion of /d/ in words like verdad ‘truth’ and virtud ‘virtue’ has been reported since the 16^th century, and this tendency is confirmed by recent experimental studies. As Hualde and Eager (2016) demonstrate, this is a lexical rather than a frequency effect, as words with very different frequencies exhibit similar processes. ¹

Similar alternations are documented in Catalan (Bonet & Lloret, 1998), Galician (Regueira, 1999), and Portuguese (Cruz Ferreira, 1999). In contrast, relatively little is known about French. French differs from the other Western Romance languages in the evolution of its intervocalic voiceless stops from Latin. Whereas the bilabial voiceless stop became the labial fricative /v/, coronal and velar voiceless stops were lost (Sánchez Miret, 2007). Very few studies have reported synchronic lenition of voiced stops in French. Duez (1995, p. 424), based on data obtained from two participants engaged in a spontaneous dialogue, observed instances of lenition of voiced stops to fricatives (i.e., /b/ realized as [v] or [w]) and approximants (i.e., /d/ > [l] or [ɥ]). These patterns, however, are very different from those reported in other Western Romance languages. A more recent study (Sunara, 2011), based on the acoustic analysis of read speech obtained from four Quebec and European French speakers, showed that voiced consonants in French lenite more than voiceless ones. Sunara also reported a place-based asymmetry with coronal consonants weakening more that either labials or velars. While word-final stop deletion has not been reported for French, as with Spanish, devoicing does occur. Jatteau et al. (2019) report pre-pausal devoicing in 27 % of the voiced stops in their Standard French corpus. No effects were observed for place of articulation and the highest rate of complete devoicing occurred in semi-formal as compared to casual or formal speech; the authors caution that the effect of speech style may be a consequence of their semi-formal speech corpus involving overlapping speech that artificially raised F0 detection.

Torreira and Ernestus’ (2011) acoustic analysis of French and Spanish conversational speech reveals that French voiceless stops may also be lenited. These researchers studied the realization of intervocalic /p t k/ as produced by speakers from Central and Northern France. A small number (5.4 %) of productions involved incomplete closures particularly in word-medial as compared to word-final position, more often with /k/ than /p/, and less often in accented compared to unaccented syllables. Weakening via complete voicing of the stops also characterized 8.5 % of realizations.

Given the scarcity of studies on French, our first goal here is to contribute to our understanding of lenition in Romance languages by providing new data for this language and comparing the articulatory realization of /t d/ in both languages using electropalatography (EPG). Our second goal is to contextualize our findings in light of crosslinguistic patterns of consonant fortition and lenition documented in previous articulatory (Fougeron, 2001) and acoustic studies (Napoleão de Souza, 2019).

Previous acoustic and articulatory studies on lenition in Romance, based mainly on data from Spanish and Catalan, have uncovered a series of factors that favor the lenition of voiced and voiceless stops. As already mentioned, position in the phrase conditions the alternation between Spanish stops and approximants. Lavoie (2001), using acoustic and EPG data, claims that the most relevant variable (e.g., more important than stress) to characterize lenition patterns in Spanish is position in the utterance. Indeed, this researcher observed the lowest degree of contact in word-medial intervocalic position, the highest in word-initial, utterance-initial position. Parrell’s (2011, 2014) electromagnetic articulography (EMA) study confirms these findings for /p b/. Similar positional effects for French were found by Jatteau et al. (2019) for voiced stop devoicing and by Torreira and Ernestus (2011) for intervocalic voiceless stop lenition.

Whereas there is consensus that position in the utterance conditions lenition, mixed results have been obtained regarding the role of stress, stop place, and preceding segments. For Spanish, Cole, Hualde and Iskarous (1999), Ortega Llebaria (2004), and Colantoni and Marinescu (2010) reported a higher degree of lenition in unstressed than in stressed syllables, whereas Lavoie (2001) failed to find a significant difference in the maximum degree of contact in /t d/ in stressed versus unstressed syllables in different positions in the sentence. Place asymmetries have been documented as well. Coronals delete more often than labials or dorsals in Spanish (Bybee, 2001; Colantoni & Marinescu, 2010) and lenite 70% more often than the other stops in French (Sunara, 2011), which conflicts with the place-based lenition hierarchies (e.g., velars before labials and coronals) proposed by Escure (1997) and Wireback (1997). More recent studies (Jatteau et al., 2019; Torreira & Ernestus, 2011), however, found no effect for place of articulation on pre-pausal devoicing and voiceless stop lenition, respectively. These results are consistent with previous acoustic studies (Lewis, 2001; Recasens, 2015), and articulatory studies (Lavoie, 2001) have failed to observe any difference either in relative intensity or the percentage of maximum contact. As concerns the effect of preceding segments, both vowel type (Cole et al., 1999; Ortega Llebaria, 2004) and the constriction of the preceding consonant (Hualde, Shosted & Scarpace, 2011) appear to affect the degree of lenition in Spanish.

Finally, the degree of lenition may also vary across dialects of the same language. For example, Lewis (2001) observed a higher degree of lenition in Peninsular than in Colombian Spanish. Such dialectal variation might lead one to expect differences in the degree of lenition across languages. A more recent crossdialectal study (Butera, 2018) also reported different degrees of weakening as well as different contextual and social factors affecting weakening across seven varieties. In particular, Butera observed that, although voiced and voiceless stops differed significantly in the CV intensity ratio in all varieties, differences were the largest in Mexico and the Andean dialects and the lowest in the Caribbean region. Stress significantly affected the CV intensity ratio in the Andean region, the Canary Islands, Chile, and Spain but had no effect in the data from the Caribbean, Argentina or Mexico. Position in the phrase turned out to be significant in the Andean region, Chile, the Caribbean, and the Canary Islands but not in the remaining three regions. Finally, younger speakers and males showed an overall tendency to have less constricted consonants than the other groups. Based on this large degree of inter-dialectal variation, it is clear that the factors conditioning lenition within and between languages can only be determined empirically.

The goal of the present study is to compare lenition of French and Spanish /t d/ based on EPG data collected from 11 speakers, exploring possible similarities and differences in this process between the languages. Specifically, this will be done by comparing the overall degree of contact (Q) in Spanish (Peninsular, Cuban, and Argentine) and French (Quebec and European) /t/ and /d/, examining the effect of position in the utterance (initial, medial, final) in conditioning this variation as well as of stress (pretonic & tonic (both languages); posttonic (Spanish alone)).

While the extrapolation of our results to French and Spanish more generally must be done with some caution given the small number of speakers and certain imbalances in the stimuli set, they nonetheless show that, overall, the degree of linguopalatal contact is greater for /t/ than for /d/ in both languages with the difference being larger in Spanish. This is unsurprising given the extensive literature documenting allophonic alternations between voiced and voiceless stops. The other salient between-language difference is the lenition hierarchy. In French, there was a relatively greater amount of decreased contact moving from initial to word-medial to word-final position for both coronal stops. That lenition affects word-initial consonants less is in keeping with Fougeron’s (2001) finding of general domain-initial strengthening in French. In Spanish, the same hierarchy holds for /t/. As in previous studies, both languages differ in the degree of lenition of /t/. In parallel to Torreira and Ernestus’s (2011) findings, the degree of contact is lower in Spanish than in French (see Figure 4a versus Figure 8a). With /d/, in contrast, it is rather word-initial > word-final > word-medial. Finally, in both French and Spanish, less lenition was observed when the words were pronounced in isolation compared to carrier sentences. This effect was particularly pronounced for Spanish initial /d/. Thus, our overall results confirm previous acoustic analyses showing weakening in French voiced (Duez, 1995; Sunara, 2011) and voiceless stops (Torreira & Ernestus, 2011), and also confirm positional asymmetries reported in Spanish acoustic and articulatory studies. This includes lenition patterns of final /d/, which although less commonly documented than lenition in other positions, includes fricativization and fronting of the consonant and lexical effects. As in previous studies (e.g. Navarro Tomás, 1977; García Mouton & Molina Martos, 2015; Hualde & Eager, 2016), fricativization was observed in our Peninsular speaker and lenition was more frequent in some lexical items (e.g., virtud) than in others (e.g., abad) across participants.

Although the two languages are similar in the overall patterns, they clearly differ in the degree of lenition of both stops, especially of /d/, which is usually deleted in intervocalic position in Spanish but not in French. Additionally, Spanish voiceless stops also show clear signs of weakening with anterior contact values that resembled those obtained for French /d/. Some differences were also observed in the degree of lenition by context as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

As concerns stress, a significant but different effect was observed in both languages (pretonic > tonic in French versus tonic > posttonic in Spanish). We observed a clear asymmetry in the degree of lenition between stressed and unstressed syllables in Spanish. Contra Lavoie’s (2001) findings, our results are consistent with previous studies that have found that lenition is affected by stress in different dialects (Colantoni & Marinescu, 2010; Cole et al., 1999; Ortega Llebaria, 2004). Although the results for French apparently contradict this tendency, with greater lenition found in tonic than in pretonic syllables, we argue that the factor that is relevant in French is position in the word: in this language, there is a clear asymmetry between strengthening in word-initial position versus weakening in word-final position.

Dialectal effects were observed in the Spanish and the French datasets. As concerns the former, we found differences in the degree of lenition of word-final /d/, which was larger for the Argentine speakers than for the other two participants, and in the realization of word-initial consonants, particularly in isolated words. Although our results support previous research regarding differences in the degree of lenition across Spanish varieties (Butera, 2018; Lewis, 2001), they are not completely consistent with differences reported in the only study which includes Argentine, Caribbean, and Peninsular speakers. As discussed in the introduction, Butera (2018) did not find significant stress-related differences in the Argentine data, neither reported significant differences for position in the phrase. Our cross-dialectal comparison, however, needs to be interpreted with caution given that we had five Argentine participants but only one participant representing each of the other two varieties. Dialectal differences were also found for French. We observed a greater degree of lenition for /d/ in the two participants from Quebec. As concerns Spanish, the patterns seem to be more consistent with individual differences in articulatory precision than with dialectal differences, since the greater degree of constriction was found in the speaker with the slowest speaking rate.

In summary, our findings provide some initial insights into French’s place on the Romance continuum of lenition. Specifically, we found evidence that French is moving in the direction of the other Romance languages, albeit at a slower pace and with a slightly different hierarchy (word-final > word-medial), which in turn is consistent with previous patterns of lenition documented in the language. This between-language difference could be due to diachronic factors. Since Latin intervocalic voiceless stops were either fricativized or deleted in French (Sánchez Miret, 2007) whereas they became voiced stops in other Western Romance varieties, we can assume that French is undergoing a second voicing cycle. In Spanish, as observed in previous studies, voiced stops, particularly /d/ (Bybee, 2001; Colantoni & Marinescu, 2010), are at the extreme of the lenition continuum even in read speech.

Some of the usual disclaimers apply to our study. We have an unbalanced number of stimuli per context and per language, and while efforts were made to control for vowel context by excluding tautosyllabic high front vowels from our stimuli, differences among stimuli existed. We believe, however, that our study constitutes a first step in providing articulatory evidence of the parallels in the weakening processes observed in these two Romance languages.