Fake geminates in French: A production and perception study

Abstract

This paper examines the role of consonantal quantity from Latin to the Romance languages, concentrating on the situation in contemporary French, where fake or apparent geminates quite frequently arise in morpheme concatenation, often as a consequence of schwa deletion. A series of production and perception experiments shows that the required surface contrasts are neither represented nor identified consistently, speakers rather show a tendency to delete geminates in favor of a simplified syllable structure but at the cost of morpheme identity. © 2006 Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody.