How are word-final schwas different in the north and south of france?

The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) give a large-scale description in realized word-final schwas of French lexical words for different regions (North vs. South) and different speaking styles (read vs. spontaneous speech); (ii) highlight differences in prosodic features and test these differences via automatic classification techniques. The proposed study relies on a subset of 12.5 hours of the French PFC corpus. Manually transcribed speech was segmented and labeled using automatic speech alignment and a pronunciation dictionary including optional word-final schwas for all words ending in a consonant. f0 and intensity values were extracted and averaged over segments. Our study revealed that, for both speaking styles, wordfinal schwas of southern French tended to keep relatively high f0 values and longer durations in comparison with northern French where f0 tends to drop on a word-final schwa. On average, spontaneous speech featured smaller f0 drops between final full vowel and subsequent word-final schwa vowel as well as longer durations. The automatic North/South classification of wordfinal schwas achieved better results for spontaneous speech. As for distinguishing between speaking styles, southern French obtained slightly better scores than the northern varieties.