Devoiced Vocalic in French

What are the structural and functional factors that condition French vowel devoicing ? To answer this question, we interviewed 56 informants, of both sexes, and of Belgian, Canadian, French and Swiss origin. The informants were asked to read a two page text in which were carefully placed 60 words containing the vowels /i/, /y/ and /u/, taken from all environments of the speech chain. Thus, our corpus contains 3 300 vowels. The structural properties closely scrutinized are type of vowel devoicing, stress, number of syllables, their nature, the position of the syllable in the word, the preceeding and following consonants, vowel length, and the value of each vowel's first three formants. Among the functional variables studied are sex and geographic origin of the informants.