An ultrasound study of Canadian French rhotic vowels

Abstract

Some speakers of Canadian French produce the vowels /o// and /œ/ with a rhotic perceptual quality, leading pneu, docteur, and brun to sound like /pnr/, /dOktarR/, and /bRr/. English /r/ can be produced with a variety of tongue shapes (including bunched and retroflex variants; Delattre and Freeman 1968, etc.), raising the question of whether French rhotic vowels are also produced with categorically different tongue shapes. Mid-sagittal ultrasound video was recorded for three native speakers of Canadian French producing words containing /œ/, /œR/, and /o// in a carrier phrase. Acoustic analysis of rhotic- and non-rhotic-sounding vowels reveals that the rhotic perceptual quality is associated with a low third formant, which is an important acoustic cue for English /r/. Two of the subjects produced rhotic vowels with a tip-down bunched tongue shape closely resembling Delattre and Freeman's type 4 and one subject produced them with a retroflex tongue shape. The study provides articulatory data on retroflex vowels, which are typologically rare, and on bunched-retroflex variation in a language other than English. The parallel cases of articulatory variability in French and English raise opportunities for investigating articulatory-acoustic mapping in bilinguals.