Milne, Peter M.
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Publication The relationship between schwa insertion and consonant cluster simplification in French: An Analysis of Covariance(2013-01-28) Milne, Peter M.This research in concerned with predicting rates of schwa insertion following consonant clusters at word boundaries in French. We are interested in knowing whether there are differences in rates of schwa insertion following a word-final consonant cluster predicted to simplify as compared with clusters predicted to remain stable in two dialects of French. Our data is drawn from a corpus of political debates from the national assemblies of Que ́bec and France. It contains approximately 126 hours of speech data from more than 200 speakers. We use an analysis of covariance to investigate the effects of dialect and cluster on rates of schwa insertion after taking into account differences in rates of reduction. Since differences in rates of schwa insertion due to rates of reduction can be predicted, then the differences in rates of schwa insertion between dialects that would be expected due to differences in rates of reduction can also be predicted. Any differences beyond these pre- dictions cannot be put down to differences in rates of reduction and can therefore be attributed to differences between the groups. The data contain rates of both reduction and schwa insertion for word final consonant clusters in each dialect. The data is further grouped according to whether the cluster is predicted to simplify or remain stable. We consider four variables: a response variable of rates of Schwa insertion, two categorical explanatory variables of Dialect and Cluster, and one covariate variable of rates of Reduction. Initial examination of a portion of the data suggest that the best model to fit the data contains three intercepts (a common intercept for all clusters in the France dialect, and one for each level of the explanatory variable Cluster for Que ́bec) and the regression line of Schwa against Reduction will be the same for all four. This suggests that, after controlling for differences in rates of reduction, there is a significant difference in rates of schwa insertion in the Que ́bec dialect between clusters predicted to simplify and clusters predicted to remain stable. There is no significant difference in rates of schwa insertion in the France dialect between these two groups of clusters. However, the relationship between cluster reduction and schwa insertion is the same in both dialects.Publication The Effects of Syllable Position on Allophonic Variation in Québec French /R/(2012-09-01) Milne, Peter M.The value in working with natural language corpora is the ability to collect large volumes of emprical data with which to test research hypotheses. The challenge in generating these data is how to quickly and accurately, with some degree of objectivity, identify linguistic units as data points. This paper offers a description of how to adapt the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner for use with a corpus of Qu\'ebec French and how to extract meaningful data from the alignment results. The results of adapting the aligner for use with this corpus of French are encouraging. Two illustrations demonstrate how to profitably use this emprical data to evaluate several hypotheses concerning the relationship and effects of syllable position on allophonic variation of /R/. The literature review indicates that, along with sociolinguistic variables such as age, and, to a lesser extent, social class, gender, and education, the most commonly cited factors potentially influencing /R/ allophony are syllabic position followed to a lesser extent by phonetic environment. There are two observations that help to motivate the current research question. Most recent sociolinguistic studies conclude that the frequency of occurences of the apical trill is rapidly decreasing and that in the corpus used for the current study, [r] is no longer the dominant variant and posterior variants should be expected. In addition to the loss of the apical trill, a uvular approximant is now noted as a frequently occurring allophone of /R/, most common intervocalically. The results presented here do not support the hypothesis that allophonic variation is related to, or effected by, syllable position. Approximants and trills were equally likely to occur in either onsets or codas when intervocalic, and only slightly more likely to occur in complex onsets when post-consonantal. The results do support the hypothesis that approximants and trills are more sonorous than fricatives as measured by the amount of energy in their first formant and their centre of gravity. Approximants and trills had significantly higher values for energy in their first formant frequency, and significantly lower values for centre of gravity than fricatives.