On the production of sandhi phenomena in French: psycholinguistic and acoustic data

This preliminary study addresses two complementary questions about the production of sandhi phenomena in French. First, we investigated whether the encoding of enchaînement and liaison enchaînée involves a processing cost compared to non-resyllabified sequences. This question was analyzed with a psycholinguistic production time paradigm. The elicited sequences were then used to address our second question, namely how critical V1CV2 sequences are phonetically realized across different boundary conditions. We compared the durational properties of critical sequences containing a word-final coda consonant (enchaînement: V1.C#V2), an additional consonant (liaison enchaînée: V1+C#V2) and a similar onset consonant (V1#CV2). Results on production latencies suggested that the encoding of liaison enchaînée involves an additional processing cost compared to the two other boundary conditions. In addition, the acoustic analyses indicated durational differences across the three boundary conditions on V1, C and V2. Implications for both, psycholinguistic and phonological models are discussed.