Realizations of French voiced fricatives by German learners as a function of speaker level and prosodic boundaries

We analyzed the realizations of French voiced fricatives /,Ʒ/ by German learners of French as a function of learners’ levels and prosodic boundaries. Fricatives are embedded in sentences and appear in final position of an accentual group, but not in sentence final position. Results showed that the performance of the speakers is linked to the way they realized boundaries. In particular, we observe that advanced speakers preferred to realize no pause after the fricatives, and that, in this intervocalic context, these speakers produced more voiced fricatives than beginners.