This dissertation investigates French intonational structure and the role of language-specific intonational cues to speech segmentation, the listener's task of determining where words begin and end. The Lady Mondegreen of the title never existed: she was created in the imagination of a young child who missegmented a line from one of her favorite poems.
French intonation is characterized by an obligatory fundamental frequency (F0) rise on the last syllable of a phrase (1a) and an optional early rise near the beginning (1b).
(1) a. [Les gamins sages] jardinaient. The good kids were gardening.
b. [Les GAmins SAGES] jardinaient.
A production experiment examined the text-to-tune alignment of these rises, the timing of F0 peaks and valleys with respect to segmental landmarks. The low starting point of the early rise was consistently located at the function word-content word boundary (e.g., the determiner-noun boundary in les | GAmins SAGES). There was also sometimes an F0 inflection or elbow at that boundary, even where there was no early rise. The evidence supports a model in which the early rise is a bitonal phrase accent and the late rise a bitonal pitch accent.
Three perception experiments examined whether the early rise and F0 elbow serve as cues to content word beginnings. Natural speech was recorded and F0 manipulated through resynthesis. In Experiment 1, participants listened to noise-masked minimal and near-minimal pairs of phrases differing only in segmentation and presence versus absence of an early rise (e.g., le niveau de mécénat the level of patronage/ le niveau de mes sénats the level of my senates) and indicated what they heard. Listeners interpreted an early rise as a marker of a content word beginning. In Experiment 2, the timing of the early rise was manipulated in minimal pairs of nonwords. Sequences like [me.la.mɔ̃.din] were perceived as two words ( mes lamondines ‘my lamondines’) when the early rise started at the second syllable ([la]) and as a single word mélamondine) when it started at the first syllable ([me]). Using a similar paradigm, Experiment 3 showed that not only early rises, but also simple F0 elbows cued content word beginnings.