Corrélats physiologiques de l’accent en français

Abstract

Abstract This investigation examines the relation between the prosodemes of stress in French and some of its prosodic features (both physiological and acoustic). Airflow is not found to provide much information about emphatic or unemphatic stress. Subglottal pressure patterns for unemphatic stress are very much like Lieberman’s ‘archetypal normal breath-group’. Emphatic stress is characterized by a sharp increase of subglottal pressure occurring on or just before the stressed syllable. A comparison with English shows that for the English subject the average subglottal pressure is markedly higher for emphatic stress than for unemphatic stress, whereas for the two French subjects this average is of the same order of magnitude for both types of accent, with a marked difference only on the stressed syllable.