Positional Determination of the Quality of the Schwa in English

Nadine Herry-Bénit (1, 2) , Roussi Nikolov (2) , Anne Tortel (2)

1 LAPS - Linguistique Anglaise, Psycholinguistique
2 UP8 UFR LLCER-LEA - Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis - UFR Langues et cultures étrangères

The prototypical articulatory-acoustic properties of schwa being normally thought of as definitional, this vowel sound is typically described in terms of tongue position as a mid-central, neutral vowel sound. At the same time, instrumental analysis shows that schwa in English is context-driven to a much larger extent than any other vowel; articulatorily, it is in fact “inherently unspecified for tongue position”, and acoustically, a comparison of the experimental data with this first approximation model does not show a good agreement, hence the interest of a systematic contextual study of schwa.

Mots clés: acoustic phonetics; schwa vowel; context-driven quality

Domaines: Linguistique

Nadine Herry-Bénit, Roussi Nikolov, Anne Tortel. Positional Determination of the Quality of the Schwa in English. Scientific Works, 2009, 47, pp.247-257. ⟨hal-01363440⟩