Coronal stop lenition in French and Spanish: Electropalatographic evidence

Laura  Colantoni; Alexei  Kochetov; Jeffrey  Steele

doi:10.3989/loquens.2021.080

Authors

Laura Colantoni University of Toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9731-0077
Alexei Kochetov University of Toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1641-4270
Jeffrey Steele University of Toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8642-8985

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3989/loquens.2021.080

Keywords:

lenition, voiceless and voiced coronal stops, French, Spanish

Abstract

Lenition of voiced and, to a lesser extent, voiceless stops is widely attested in Western Romance languages. In Spanish, utterance-initial voiced stops as well as those following nasals alternate with approximants in intervocalic position. Acoustic and articulatory studies have revealed factors that condition phonetic weakening. In contrast, very little is known about stop weakening in French. In this paper, using electropalatography, we provide articulatory evidence for the lenition of /t d/ in both Spanish and French. Data obtained from seven Spanish-speaking and four French-speaking participants reveal that, in both languages, /d/ is produced with less linguopalatal contact than /t/, and these differences are strongly conditioned by the position within the utterance or word. The languages differ, however, in the degree of /d/ lenition as well as in some of the contextual conditioning factors. Overall, our results, which should be interpreted with some caution given the number of speakers and the balance of the stimuli set, show that French resembles other Romance languages in its phonetic patterns of lenition, differing mainly in the degree of weakening.

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