Acoustic realization of vowels as a function of syllabic position

Corpora of prepared speech were compared between two Romance languages: French and Spanish. Results of this comparison show that owing to its presence of lexical stress—itself involving acoustic strengthening—Spanish, in contrast to French, reveals acoustic strengthening with word-final lengthening. However, acoustic variations due to other factors such as vowel duration, speech rate, and presence of pause are similar in both languages, contradicting some findings of previous studies in this domain. Spanish Prosodic Words and French Accentual Phrases are closely analyzed, with data normalized by speaker. The major result of this study is that, while for both languages an overall strengthening of the vowels with a longer duration and a slower speech rate is observed, vowel strengthening due to syllable position within the word reveals significant differences between French and Spanish.