Rhythm Types and the Speech of Working-Class Youth in a Banlieue of Paris 117average grade (moyenne générale) in school were better predictors of their
patterning in two groups than either %V, ǻV, o r ǻC. Articulatory rate and the
number of segments in a phrase, with the two factors tied together, were the
only individually signi¿ cant predictors.
AF speakers’ readings appeared slightly less vocalic (low %V values)
than non-heritage speakers’, while both groups showed similar amounts of
consonantal duration variations (ǻC). AF speakers showed somewhat more
variability in the length of vocalic intervals (higher ǻV values). Thus, the
hypothesis that AF speakers’ speech would be more consonantal was con-
¿ rmed, but greater ǻV or ǻC variations, as one would have expected it in
stress-timed languages with more complex syllable structure, were not found.
All these effects were not statistically signi¿ cant.
Traces of heritage language use were found in vowel epenthesis, unusual
in Northern varieties of French, glottal onset consonants that appeared in
three AF and one EF speakers’ readings. Contrary to predictions, all speak-
ers showed strong tendencies towards open syllabicity, and heritage language
inÀ uence did not extend beyond the acoustic realizations of individual sounds.
Closed syllables with non-branching onsets, nuclei, and codas were the second
most frequent syllable type in both groups. These patterns of uniformity were
statistically more important than differences in vowel epenthesis and types of
onset realizations. Thus, the hypothesis that AF speakers would prefer heavy
and closed rather than light and open syllables was not con¿ rmed.
The most unexpected ¿ nding was the tendency of AF speakers to devoice
vowels in closed syllables in word-initial positions where EF speakers did not
show such tendency. This might be part of the factors that lead to the slightly
more consonantal character of AF speakers’ speech. Since devoicing can
drastically reduce the amplitude of vowels, from a perceptual point of view
it represents a type of vowel reduction. Thus some degree of vowel reduction
was present in AF speakers’ readings. But to what extent should such ¿ ne
details of acoustic realization be worthy of our attention?
- Discussion
Fine-grained acoustic characteristics of speech segments are rarely examined
in studies of rhythm type distinctions, because such distinctions are often
not salient enough to be detected by averages and dispersion measures. On
the basis of non-normalized vocalic and consonantal duration distributions,
Ghazali et al. (2002) showed evidence of rhythm type distinctions between
Western and Eastern dialects of Arabic. Based on normalized and non-