FRENCH LIAISON: LINGUISTIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON SPEECH PERCEPTION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Robin Guillaume Dautricourt, B.A., M.A. Graduate Program in Linguistics The Ohio State University 2010 Dissertation Committee: Professor Shari R. Speer, Advisor Professor Mary E. Beckman Professor Mark A. Pitt Copyright by Robin Guillaume Dautricourt 2010 i Abstract French liaison is a phonological process that takes place when an otherwise silent word-final consonant is pronounced before a following vowel-initial word. It is a process that has been evolving for centuries, and whose patterns of realization are influenced by a wide range of interacting linguistic and social factors. French speakers therefore not only have to adapt their lexical identification processes to words ending in liaison consonants, but they also have to learn the rules which govern when they could pronounce the liaison consonants, and when they should expect them to be pronounced by other speakers. This dissertation begins by establishing a comprehensive understanding of liaison production with a focus on the linguistic and social factors that influence its present day usage. The challenges which liaison presents to theories of word segmentation and speech perception are then established, followed by the presentation of a series of psycholinguistic experiments that manipulate some of the most salient factors that are known to influence liaison production (e.g. syntactic context, liaison consonant identity, speaker age, and speaker social class). The first experiment investigates the effects of liaison in four different environments, and not only provides evidence that liaison consonants can facilitate word recognition of the following vowel-initial word, but that this effect is more likely to take place in contexts where liaison consonants are more likely to occur in production. A series of three experiments then use auditory stimuli from a corpus of radio ii interviews and visual stimuli consisting of photographed individuals in order to explore the influences of age and social class on the perception of liaison. Ultimately, the hypothesis that listeners’ expectations of speakers’ social identities can influence speech perception is put to the test using a cross-modal priming paradigm. iii Dedicated to My daughter, Annalise Rose Dautricourt, to your first smiles, My son, Daniel Victor Dautricourt, to your first words, My wife, Safiya Lyles Dautricourt, to our love. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank my committee members Shari Speer, Mary Beckman, and Mark Pitt for their continuous support throughout the completion of this dissertation. Thank you for your comments and suggestions, but above all thank you for your enthusiasm and encouragement. I would also like to thank Keith Johnson for his guidance in the early phase of this dissertation. I am grateful for the funding which made this dissertation possible, and would like to acknowledge the OSU Linguistics department for many years of teaching and research assistantships. I am also very thankful for the NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant which funded all of the data collection in Paris, France. I am also endebted to Voxify, my current employer, and to the VUI team in particular, for being so generous with the time and support that helped me to complete this dissertation. Thank you to Sharon Peperkamp and Emmanuel Dupoux, for providing me with a host institution in Paris, France, along with the facilities in which I ran my experiments. I would like to thank Radio France, for permissions to use recordings from their radio programs as the basis for experimental stimuli. The linguistic community at OSU was my home for many years, and I would like to thank everyone who helped make it so. Thank you especially to Georgios Tserdanelis, v Bill Raymond, Elizabeth Hume, Brian Joseph, Jeff Mielke, Steve Winters, Laurie Maynell, Allison Blodgett, Na’im Tyson, Pauline Welby, Anton Rytting, Wesley Collins, and Andrea Sims. To Jai Flicker, Isha Leinow, Brandon Stieg, Korin Crawford, and Brian Dowd, thank you for the conversations we shared and for the faith you had in my ability to complete this project. To Brian Dowd, from our historic journey across the country to the steps of Oxley Hall, we started this adventure together. Thank you for everything that makes our friendship what it is. May our journeys always overlap. To Georgios Tserdanelis and David White, you were the closest thing to family in Columbus and I’ll always be grateful. May we always be family. To the French side of my family, thank you especially for your hospitality and for your interest in my research. Special thanks to my uncle Philippe Dautricourt for translation assistance over the years, to my aunt Marie-Claude Dautricourt for her assistance in Paris when I was running my experiments, and to my cousins Nicolas Dautricourt and Ludovic Dautricourt, for hosting me during my stay in Paris. To Kalani Dautricourt, for your presence and spirit in Paris, everywhere and always. To Serge Dautricourt, my brother, thank you for your positive energy and support over the years. To Mary and Jean-Pierre Dautricourt, my parents, thank you for instilling in me the belief that I can accomplish anything I set out to do. You have always been there for me, always believed in me, and I thank you for all of the unconditional love and support. vi To Annalise Rose Dautricourt, my daughter, you have been at my side during the most challenging part of this dissertation and you have given me more inspiration than you’ll ever know. You learned to clap only days before I finished this dissertation. To Daniel Victor Dautricourt, my son, you changed my life. May we always remember some of your favorite words during the last dissertation months: phone? key? more? encore? apple? down? up? pam? ‘pain’, open? door? doggie? juice? shoes? ou(t)si(de)? fa-he? ‘coffee’, beer? ‘computer’… ok. To Safiya Lyles Dautricourt, my wife and partner in life, this dissertation is for you. Thank you for your ongoing support and dedication to this project. Thank you especially for inspiring the revival that led to its completion. I couldn’t have done this without you. vii Vita September 11, 1977 .......................................Born – Châteauroux, France 1999................................................................B.A. Linguistics, University of California San Diego 2005................................................................M.A. Linguistics, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Linguistics Specialization: Psycholinguistics viii Table of Contents Abstract............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication.......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... v Vita...................................................................................................................................viii List of Tables .................................................................................................................... xv List of Figures................................................................................................................xviii Chapters: 1. The Linguistics of Liaison ............................................................................................ 1 1.1 Introduction............................................................................................................ 1 1.2 Historical context................................................................................................... 4 1.2.1 Liaison as a result of diachronic change ..................................................... 4 1.2.2 Liaison consonants and word boundary patterns ........................................ 8 1.3 Descriptive approaches to French liaison ............................................................ 14 1.3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................... 14 1.3.2 Categorization of obligatory, optional, and prohibited liaisons ................ 15 1.3.3 Summary ................................................................................................... 20 1.4 Theoretical approaches to French liaison ............................................................ 21 1.4.1 Phonological approaches to French liaison............................................... 21 1.4.2 Syntactic approaches to French liaison ..................................................... 23 1.4.3 Summary ................................................................................................... 25 1.5 Quantitative studies of French liaison production ............................................... 26 1.5.1 Review of liaison corpus studies............................................................... 26 1.5.2 Corpus evidence for the influence of linguistic factors on liaison realization.................................................................................................. 28 1.5.2.1 Syntactic environment .................................................................. 28 1.5.2.2 Lexical properties.........................................................................