Looking for acoustic cues of resyllabification in French

In this paper, we address the question of whether so-called “resyllabification” is total in French. Durational properties of vowels and consonants in a sequence with “enchainement” (V1.C#V2) are compared with phonetically similar sequences containing a word-initial consonant (V1#CV2), and a non-word-initial syllable-onset consonant (V1.CV2). This three-way comparison shows that although inter-speaker and inter-consonant type differences exist, the enchainement consonants generally differ from underlying syllable onsets (word-initial or not) by showing a shorter duration. Moreover, lexical and syllabic boundaries may be differentiated by cues on the pre-consonantal vowel rather than on the initial consonant. These results provide further evidence that resyllabification can be partial in French, and that the surface form of so-called “resyllabified” sequences can preserve cues of their abstract lexical and syllabic structure.