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Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Quantifying French liaison-induced homophony

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rory TurnbullORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

© 2022 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)The French phonological rule of liaison, whereby certain underlying word-final consonants surface only when the following word starts with a vowel, sometimes creates homophony. For instance, un œuf 'an egg' and un neuf 'a nine' are both pronounced [ε.nœf ̃]. While homophony is cross-linguistically frequent, there is evidence that it is constrained in various ways. Here, we quantify liaison-induced homophony by comparing its occurrence in real French to that in a benchmark consisting of versions of French with modified liaison consonants. We find that liaison induces more homophony in the benchmark than in real French. This is the first evidence that a phonological rule that applies across words is subject to an anti-homophony bias.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Peperkamp S, Antoine V, Turnbull R

Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)

Publication status: Published

Conference Name: 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022

Year of Conference: 2022

Pages: 2409-2415

Online publication date: 01/06/2022

Acceptance date: 02/04/2022

Date deposited: 30/01/2023

Publisher: The Cognitive Science Society

URL: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6s55q1n9

Series Title: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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