1.1. Theoretical accounts of coarticulatory variation

A major theoretical stance is that phonetic variation can be related to perceptual motivations, i.e., that speakers structure the speech signal to be maximally intelligible for listeners, especially to be robust under all types of adverse communicative contexts. What does this mean for synchronic, within-language patterns of coarticulation? There are two different approaches to this question – coarticulatory constraint and coarticulatory enhancement accounts – which we explore in this section.

Some researchers hold that coarticulation can jeopardize phonological contrast in languages where the same phonetic value is realized as both a coarticulatory and a contrastive property. Coarticulatory constraint proposals, such as those by Manuel (1990; 1999; inter alia), hypothesize that coarticulation is constrained to maintain perceptual contrast as determined by the phoneme inventory of a language. For example, Manuel and Krakow (1984) found that the fewer phonemic vowels a language has, the more extensive the realization vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is, compared to a language with more phonemic vowels. In other words, the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is shown to be constrained when there are more phonemic vowel distinctions. In other words, the finite acoustic space for the range of possible vowel permutations requires vowel systems with more phonemic vowels to delimit contextual effects in order to maintain contrast between the vowels.

In French, words can differ phonologically with respect to nasality on the vowel (e.g., beau /bo/ vs. bon /bõ/). But non-contrastive coarticulatory nasality occurs in the context of nasal consonants, as well. In these cases, the vowels are underlyingly oral, but are produced with some amount of phonetic nasalization due to gestural overlap from the velum lowering associated with the coda (e.g., bonne /bon/ [bõn]: Cohn 1990; Delvaux et al. 2008). So oral vowels are nasalized when they occur adjacent to nasal consonants. This means that vowel nasality is both contrastive and non-contrastive in French. Hence, a listener who encounters a nasalized vowel in French would have to discern whether the nasality is the result of a contrastively (i.e., phonologically) nasal vowel or a phonetically nasalized oral vowel preceding a nasal consonant coda (note that nasal vowels are not allowed before nasal codas in French, *ṼN). Thus, in French, the very fact that vowel nasality is contrastive in the language might limit the realization of anticipatory coarticulation, or might lead to perceptual difficulty or confusion to the extent that it does occur. Comprehensive existing production studies of vowel nasality in French indeed indicate that contrastive nasality tends to be greater than anticipatory nasal coarticulation (Montagu & Amelot 2005; Delvaux et al. 2008). (In French, carryover nasal coarticulation is much greater in degree than anticipatory coarticulation, which is comparable to phonemic vowel nasality (Cohn 1990; Delvaux et al. 2008), but since we are interested in how coarticulatory variation may be relevant for providing predictive cues to listeners, the current study focuses on nasal coarticulation in words with VN sequences.) These differences in the patterns of nasalization across contrastive and anticipatory coarticulatory nasality might represent perceptually-motivated constraints on speakers.

Work by Cho and colleagues (e.g., Cho, Kim, & Kim 2017; Jang, Kim, & Cho 2018; Li, Kim, & Cho 2020) have investigated how coarticulatory vowel nasalization varies within a language as a function of prosodic prominence, such as contrastive focus marking. They find that vowels in CVN words that are produced in prosodically strong positions (either being phrase-initial or under contrastive focus) are produced with less coarticulatory nasalization than those in weaker positions. For instance, Cho et al. (2017) elicited contrastive focus through mini-dialogues such as the following: A: Were you supposed to write BOB? B: No, I was supposed to write BOMB, wasn’t I?. Despite cross-linguistic differences in the implementation of contrastive focus, similar patterns of reduced nasal coarticulation under focus were found across English, Mandarin Chinese, and Korean. Cho and colleagues interpret this as a type of phonologically-conditioned coarticulatory constraint strategy: in strong positions, speakers reduce coarticulation, both to make cues to coda nasality more synchronous with its source and, potentially, in order to enhance phonetic cues for the [orality] feature of the vowel. While these languages do not have contrastive vowel nasalization, such patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that speakers will reduce coarticulation in order to make their phonological properties distinctive and apparent.

There is also evidence that coarticulatory constraint in French, specifically, leads to word-specific variation in contextual nasalization patterns. This evidence comes from vowel-specific variation in coarticulation. Dow (2020) reports that in French, nasal coarticulation in CVN words is greater in extent for high vowels, compared to non-high vowels. Dow argues that since French does not have phonologically nasal high vowels, the constraint on reducing coarticulation to avoid lexical confusion is not active for high vowels in pre-nasal contexts. Thus, the high vowel vs. non-high vowel asymmetry in patterns of coarticulation in pre-nasal contexts is argued to be due to the presence of phonological nasalization for non-high vowels.

Yet, the extent to which such a constraint actively shapes coarticulatory patterns in French is underexplored. Does lexical contrast actively constrain nasal coarticulatory variation across words in French? One prediction from a coarticulatory constraint hypothesis is that lexical competition from a nasal vowel (CṼ) word would lead to a reduction of nasal coarticulation in its nasal-coda (CVN) minimal pair, compared to CVN words without a nasal vowel minimal pair competitor.

Yet, another hypothesis about the role of coarticulation in speech communication is that it provides phonetic cues to what is unique about the identity of a particular lexical item (Scarborough 2013; Scarborough & Zellou 2013; Zellou & Scarborough 2015; Zellou & Scarborough 2019). Coarticulatory enhancement accounts view coarticulation as useful information for listeners, since it provides redundant and predictive (for anticipatory coarticulation) cues and can be used by listeners to make perceptually relevant predictions because it is systematic (Beddor 2009; Scarborough 2013). For instance, by increasing the degree of nasalization on an English word such as bone, speakers can make the lexical item more distinct, and thus easier to discriminate, from words without nasal segments such as bode (Beddor et al. 2013; Zellou & Dahan 2019).

Note that the predictions of a coarticulatory enhancement account seem to be not supported by the results observed in the work of Cho and colleagues outlined above. Why are CVN words in focus position produced with decreased coarticulation if the speaker is responding to a listener misunderstanding? A coarticulatory enhancement account might predict increased coarticulation in those contexts. However, the cross-linguistic observation of decreased coarticulation in focused positions is consistent with articulatory strengthening of segmental gestures when words are produced in prosodically strong phrasal positions (Fougeron & Keating 1997). The strengthening of segments leads their gestures to be more concentrated on their targets and results in a reduction of temporal overlap of speech sounds (Cho et al. 2017). While prosodic strengthening of words under focus will lead to gestural restructuring due to articulatory factors, a coarticulatory enhancement account might predict that speakers produce increased coarticulatory cues when prosodic factors are controlled for. As we explore in the next section, one way to investigate predictions made by a coarticulatory enhancement account is to compare across words, produced in the same prosodic context, that differ in their perceptual difficulty.

1.2. Lexically-conditioned phonetic variation

In exploring the source of lexically-conditioned phonetic variation, this paper also adds to the growing body of work investigating the cognitive processes driving word-specific speech production. Lexically-conditioned phonetic variation is when some acoustic property of words can be systematically related to the composition, architecture, or activation of the lexicon. A fact about the lexicon is that phonological competition is not equally distributed: some words have many minimal pair competitors and others have very few. One proposal is that speakers produce phonetic cues on words to make them more distinct from their lexical competitors. For example, speakers produce words that come from lexical neighborhoods containing more phonologically similar competitors with greater vowel dispersion than words with fewer lexical competitors (Wright 1997; 2004; Munson & Solomon 2004).

Some researchers (e.g., Wright 2004) have interpreted this pattern as perceptually-motivated: vowels in the words from more dense lexical neighborhoods are hyperarticulated to make them more distinctive and, thus, more intelligible. Furthermore, Wedel and colleagues (2018) examined spontaneous speech productions of English words and found that the existence of a minimal pair or not, not neighborhood density, predicts phonetic variation. For instance, they observed that the type of phonological contrast posed by a lexical competitor affected the phonetic variation: e.g., words with an initial voiceless stop are produced with longer VOT when an initial voiced stop minimal pair exists and initial voiced stop words are produced with shorter VOT when an initial voiceless stop minimal pair exists. Critically, though, they found that minimal pair-conditioned phonetic variation serves to maximize phonetic distance between lexical competitors. Specifically, words with lax vowels are produced with more vowel centralization when it has a tense vowel minimal pair competitor (e.g., ‘ship’ vs. ‘sheep’). They argued that minimal pair competition promotes maximization of phonetic distance between lexical items.

Coarticulation has also been observed to be conditioned by lexical competition. Scarborough (2013; Scarborough & Zellou 2013) found that CVN words from more dense phonological neighborhoods are produced with greater coarticulation than words with fewer lexical competitors in English. Similar to the lexically-conditioned VOT and vowel space variation, this has also been argued to be perceptually-oriented: since words with many lexical competitors are more likely to be confusable in lexical access, enhancing their coarticulatory properties serves to make them more acoustically distinct from their phonological competitors. In other words, it shows that enhancement of coarticulatory vowel nasality in English is guided by communicative pressures to increase the cues for the final nasal sound to help listeners identify that the word is e.g., bone not bode.

Moreover, support for coarticulatory enhancement interpretation of production patterns in English comes from perceptual studies. In investigating the perceptual consequences of coarticulatory variation in English, Scarborough and Zellou (2013) reported that words containing enhanced nasal coarticulation are better perceived by listeners who completed a lexical decision task. These patterns have been interpreted as evidence that coarticulatory patterns are controlled and can be used to enhance the phonetic features of a vowel in a particular consonantal context in providing the listener with robust cues to the wholistic lexical form (Scarborough & Zellou 2013). Further evidence that American English listeners are able to leverage enhanced coarticulatory patterns to better comprehend words with nasal codas comes from Beddor, McGowan, Boland, Coetzee, & Brasher (2013) who tracked listeners’ eye movements over images depicting CVC-CVNC minimal pair items as the speech signal unfolded. They found that listeners look more quickly to the CVNC item when hearing vowels containing earlier onset of coarticulatory vowel nasalization, than when the vowels contain later-occurring nasality.

What might a perceptually-motivated account predict about how lexical competition influences coarticulatory variation in French? For French, there is indeed lexical competition from CṼ minimal pairs on some CVN words, and some CVN words do not have a CṼ minimal pair. One prediction is that CVN words with a nasal vowel minimal pair competitor are produced with even less coarticulatory nasalization than CVN words without a nasal vowel minimal pair competitor. However, there is also lexical competition from minimal pair words contrasting with oral codas (CVCs) on CVN items in French. What role does that play in actively shaping coarticulatory variation? A perceptually-motivated coarticulatory enhancement prediction might be that increasing nasal coarticulation in CVN items makes them more distinctive from their CVC competitors. Relevant to this prediction is the observation that, in French, the tongue positions for phonologically nasal vowels are distinct from those in their oral counterparts (Delvaux et al. 2002; Demolin et al. 2003; Carignan 2013; Carignan 2017). More specifically, it is reported that the nasal vowel counterparts of oral /ɛ, ɔ, ɑ/ are realized with both F2, and sometimes F1, differences, so they are more accurately transcribed as [æ̃, õ, ɔ̃], respectively (Delvaux 2009; Carignan 2014; Dow 2020). Thus, it could be argued that due to differences in vowel qualities across nasal and oral vowels there is minimal risk for confusability of CVN as containing a /Ṽ/. Given the fact that vowels in CṼ and CVN words are already phonetically distinct, the contrast between CVC and CVN in French is a greater source of confusion since the vowels in those words are the most acoustically similar. Particularly because anticipatory nasal coarticulation is minimal, such confusability could be reconciled via systematic increase in the degree of nasal coarticulation present on CVNs that have a CVC minimal pair competitor. Thus, a perceptually-motivated coarticulatory enhancement prediction is that the presence of a CVC minimal pair competitor leads French speakers to produce a greater degree of nasal coarticulation in CVN words.

However, there is an alternative account of lexically-driven phonetic variation. Some have posited speaker-internal cognitive mechanisms of lexical activation as another factor shaping phonetic variation. In particular, when a word is activated, competitor words that share phonological features are activated as well. During speech production, it is proposed that when there is minimal pair competition, the competing feature is cognitively boosted in the process of increasing the activation of the target word and inhibiting the activation of the competitor word. Baese-Berk and Goldrick (2009) investigated how this mechanisms influences phonetic variation by comparing speakers’ VOT durations when producing voiceless stop-initial English words that had a voicing minimal pair (e.g., cod, cf. god), compared to words without one (e.g., cop, *gop). They found that words with a voicing lexical competitor are produced with longer VOTs, even when the competitor is not present in a condition that might lead to perceptual confusability.

What might a lexical activation account predict for lexically-conditioned coarticulatory variation in French? Since at the phonological level vowels in CVN words are underlyingly oral, having a nasal vowel minimal pair competitor would activate the featural contrast between oral and nasal vowels. Therefore, a coarticulatory constraint pattern of results would be consistent with a lexical activation account. However, we might make a further prediction based on the lexical frequency of the minimal pair competitor. Since a lexical activation account predicts that the process of inhibiting an active competitor leads to an enhancement of the contrasting feature, we might predict that highly frequent lexical competitors result in an even larger degree of phonetic enhancement.

1.3. Current study

The current study investigates these competing predictions about the role of lexical contrast in shaping patterns of produced nasal coarticulation in (Northern Metropolitan) French. We investigate the extent to which lexical competition influences patterns of produced nasal coarticulation in French words with nasal codas.

A coarticulatory constraint hypothesis for lexical competitor-driven variation in French is that coarticulatory nasality in CVN words is inhibited to reduce confusion from a CṼ minimal pair competitor. To test this, we compare acoustic vowel nasalization patterns for CVN words that have a nasal vowel minimal pair competitor (e.g., crame /kʁam/, cf. cran /kʁɑ̃/), relative to CVN words without a nasal vowel minimal pair competitor (e.g., drame /dʁam/, */dʁɑ̃/). If lexical contrast constrains production of coarticulatory patterns, we predict that French speakers will produce less nasal coarticulation on vowels in CVN words with a nasal vowel minimal pair competitor.

A coarticulatory enhancement hypothesis is that coarticulation is enhanced on CVN words with a CVC minimal pair competitor to make them more acoustically distinctive. Thus, we also compare CVN words that do have a CVC minimal pair competitor and CVN words that do not (e.g., crame /kʁam/, cf. crabe /kʁab/ vs. flamme /flam/, */flab/). If competition with non-nasal coarticulated CVC words matters, then French speakers will produce increased nasal coarticulation on vowels in CVN words with an oral CVC vowel minimal pair competitor.

We also explore the possibility of more fine-grained lexical competition effects. Specifically, we ask whether the relative lexical frequency of the nasal vowel minimal competitor, or the CVC minimal pair competitor, predicts produced nasal-coarticulatory patterns in French. If lexically-conditioned coarticulatory variation can be directly related to the presence and strength of lexical competition, this would suggest that lexical contrast-motivated mechanisms are online, active synchronic influences on speech production.

The findings are relevant for understanding cross-linguistic phonetic patterns: while coarticulatory patterns are language-specific, gestural overlap appears to be a ubiquitous property of natural speech. Careful description of within- and across-language speech patterns can reveal what aspects of coarticulation are universal vs. which are learned. The results of this study are also relevant for models of speech production that involve a role of the lexicon into mechanisms of articulation and phonetic variation. In the case of coarticulatory variation in French, there are lexical pressures both to decrease coarticulation (to avoid confusion between CVN words and nasal-vowel minimal pairs) and to increase coarticulation (to avoid confusion between CVN words and lexical competitors that contrast in coda orality). Exploring how lexically-specific coarticulation is patterned in French can contribute to understanding what is language-specific and what is universal about phonetic variation.

3.1. Comparison across word types

Figure 2 shows mean acoustic nasality measures (A1-P0) taken at 10 equidistant timepoints over vowels from the 30 speakers’ productions of CVC, CṼ, and CVN French words. A linear mixed effects model was run on these data using the lme4 (Bates et al. 2014) and p-values were calculated using the lmerTest package (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen 2017) in R (version 4.1.2, R Core Team 2021). The model included fixed effects of timepoint (continuous variable, centered and scaled) and word type (CVC, CVN, CṼ), as well as the interaction between timepoint and word type. Word type was treatment coded, with CVC as the reference level, so that the model output shows the pairwise comparison between acoustic nasality in oral vowels and the other two levels. The dependent variable (A1-P0) was also centered and scaled prior to model fitting. The model included by-speaker and by-word random intercepts and by-speaker random slopes for each fixed effect as well as their interaction (lmer syntax: A1-P0~timepoint*word type + (1 + timepoint*word type | speaker) + (1 | word)).

Figure 2

Mean acoustic nasality (A1-P0 dB) over 10 equidistant timepoints of vowels from CVC, CVN, and CṼ word productions by 30 French speakers. Ribbons depict standard errors.

The model output is provided in Table 2. The model revealed a main effect of word type, wherein vowels in both CVN and CṼ words contained overall greater vowel nasalization (lower A1-P0 value) than vowels in CVC words. There were also significant interactions between word type and timepoint, again with negative coefficients indicating that over time vowels in CVN and CṼ words become even more nasalized (even lower A1-P0 value) than vowels in CVC words. Thus, consistent with prior work reporting nasality in French using articulatory measures (e.g., Montagu & Amelot 2005; Delvaux et al. 2008), our speakers produce patterns of categorical nasalization on phonologically nasal vowels and a minimal amount of nasalization on vowels before nasal codas (with greatest nasalization at the vowel endpoint, nearest the nasal coda).

3.2. Effect of lexical competition on CVNs

In order to test our specific hypotheses about the influence of lexical competition on degree of coarticulatory variation, a linear mixed effects model was run just on the acoustic nasality data from vowels in CVN words. There were three fixed effects of the model. First, timepoint (continuous variable, centered and scaled) was included. Second, CṼ MP category was included and sum-coded (With CṼ MP = 1, No CṼ MP = –1) such that the output of the model provides the comparison of the variable to the grand mean. Our hypothesis is that if pressure from CṼ minimal pair influences coarticulatory patterns, CVN words that have a CṼ minimal pair will be produced with less acoustic nasality, thus a higher A1-P0 value. We also hypothesized that pressure from a CVC lexical competitor might also influence coarticulatory patterns, but in the opposite direction: less acoustic nasality (higher A1-P0 value) for CVN words that do not have a CVC minimal pair competitor. Therefore, the third fixed effect we included was CVC MP category; in this case, we sum-coded the predictor so that the output level would also lead to a higher A1-P0 value (No CVC MP = 1, With CVC MP = –1).

The interaction between CṼ MP category and CVC MP Category was also included testing whether there is an additive effect of these two types of lexical pressures. Since we coded these predictors in a way that allows us to interpret a higher A1-P0 value as meaningful, we predict that a significant interaction between these two factors would result in an even more positive A1-P0 value in our model output. All two- and three-way interactions between timepoint, CṼ MP category, and CVC MP category were also included testing whether these effects are realized as differences in acoustic nasality that change over vowel duration. The model also included random intercepts for speaker and word. By-speaker random slopes for the interaction between CṼ MP category and timepoint, as well as the interaction between CVC MP category and timepoint were also included (inclusion of the three-way interaction as a random slope led to non-convergence). (lmer syntax: A1-P0~timepoint*CṼ MP category*CVC MP category + (1 + timepoint*CṼ MP category + timepoint*CVC MP category | speaker) + (1 | word)).

The model output is provided in Table 3. The model revealed a significant interaction between CṼ MP category and timepoint. The coefficient is positive indicating that over time A1-P0 values get even higher in CVN words with a minimal pair competitor (i.e., contain less acoustic vowel nasalization). This interaction is visualized in Figure 3, showing the mean A1-P0 values over normalized vowel duration for vowels in CVN words that have a CṼ minimal pair competitor and in CVN words that do not. As seen, in the portion of the vowel closest to the nasal coda, there is less coarticulatory vowel nasalization in CVN words that have a CṼ minimal pair competitor than CVN words that do not.

Figure 3

Mean acoustic nasality (A1-P0 dB) over 10 equidistant timepoints of vowels from CVN words that have a CṼ minimal pair competitor and CVN words that do not have a CṼ minimal pair competitor. Ribbons depict standard errors.

The model also computed a significant interaction between CṼ MP category, CVC MP category, and timepoint. The coefficient is also positive indicating that words with a CṼ minimal pair competitor and without a CVC minimal pair competitor are produced with less nasal (higher A1-P0 value) over time. This interaction is visualized in Figure 4: above and beyond that CVN words with a CṼ minimal pair competitor are produced with less coarticulatory nasalization, there is even larger difference between words with and without a CṼ minimal pair for words that do not have a CVC minimal pair competitor.

Figure 4

Mean acoustic nasality (A1-P0 dB) over vowel duration by CṼ MP category (linetype) and CVC MP category (panels). Ribbons depict standard errors.

No other main effects or interactions were significant.

3.3. Lexical frequency effects

The analysis on acoustic vowel nasality in CVN words revealed an effect of having a CṼ minimal pair or not, both overall and in ways mediated by the existence of a CVC lexical competitor, on produced patterns of coarticulatory nasalization. This supports our primary hypotheses that lexical competition influences coarticulatory variation in French.

In addition to the categorical effect of having a minimal pair competitor with a specific phonological structure, we also hypothesized that the relative usage frequency of such a competitor influences production pattern. We tested this hypothesis with two separate linear mixed effects regression models run on the A1-P0 values. The first model was run on acoustic nasality values from the subset of CVN words that have a CṼ minimal pair competitor (n = 16, see Table 1). The second model was run on acoustic measurements taken from CVN words that have a CVC minimal pair competitor (n = 18, see Table 1). Both models had identical fixed and random effects structures. The first fixed effect of the models was the lexical frequency value of the minimal pair competitor (logged, centered, and scaled). Additionally, since prior work has found that lexical frequency of a CVN word influences patterns of coarticulatory variation in American English (Zellou & Tamminga 2014), we also included a fixed effect of the lexical frequency value of the target CVN item (logged, centered, and scaled). The models included by-speaker and by-word random intercepts and by-speaker random slopes for item lexical frequency and minimal pair lexical frequency.

The output for the CVN words with nasal vowel (CṼ) minimal pairs is provided in Table 4, the one for CVN words with CVC minimal pairs is provided in Table 5. For the CṼ minimal pair model, there was a main effect of CṼ minimal pair lexical frequency, which is visualized in Figure 5: CVN words with more frequent CṼ lexical competitors are produced with less coarticulatory nasalization (higher A1-P0 value). No other main effects or interactions were significant. Meanwhile, there were no significant effects in the CVC minimal pair model.

Figure 5

Effect of CṼ minimal pair lexical frequency on produced coarticulatory nasalization in target CVN words.

4.1. Limitations and future directions

There were several limitations of the present study that open avenues for future research. For one, beyond lexical competition, several linguistic and socio-communicative factors are well-known to condition coarticulatory variation across languages. For instance, Scarborough and Zellou (2013) found that American English speakers produced less coarticulatory nasalization when talking to an imagined hard-of-hearing person, relative to when they produced the words to a real listener in an authentic communicative task. Perhaps, since the words in the present study were not produced with an authentic need to be intelligible, there was less actual perceptual pressure on speech production. A direction for future work is to compare these patterns when speakers are talking in more authentic contexts. Such a future direction can explore whether authentically listener-directed speech displays the same or different patterns of coarticulatory variation in French as those observed in the present study.

Another line of work that is relatively understudied is the perceptual consequences of coarticulatory variation on the intelligibility of CVN words for French listeners. While prior work has shown that enhanced nasal coarticulation leads to faster and more accurate word identification in American English (Scarborough & Zellou 2013; Beddor et al. 2013), this is underexplored for French. A question for future work is to what extent coarticulatory variation influences discrimination of the three-way CVC-CVN-CṼ lexical contrast in Parisian French.

Another ripe avenue for future work is to compare across different regional varieties of French. For instance, in Canadian French the nasal vowels are diphthongized in certain contexts (Walker 1984). Thus, nasal vowels are even more distinct in vowel quality from oral vowels than in Metropolitan French. Thus, perhaps, lexical competition from nasal vowels might be even more reduced than in European French, where sound changes have led to more distinct oral and nasal vowels. Meanwhile, in Canadian French, sound changes have led other oral and nasal vowel counterparts to be more similar. For instance, oral /a/ and nasal /ɑ̃/ have both fronted and are realized as [æ] and [æ̃], respectively (Walker 1984). Thus, we might predict even greater lexical competition effects in Canadian French where vowels have become more acoustically similar. Exploring the influence of lexical competition on coarticulatory patterns in other varieties of French is an open direction for future research.

Another relevant phenomenon at the phonetic-phonology interface in French is coarticulatory variation in carryover (NV) contexts, which was not explored in the current study. carryover coarticulation is extensive in degree in post-nasal contexts, and in fact, has been reported to be comparable in degree to contrastive nasality (Delvaux et al. 2008; Cohn 1990). Thus, the vowels in NV and NṼ words (e.g., mais ‘but’ /mɛ/ vs. main ‘hand’ /mɛ̃/) are more acoustically similar in terms of vowel nasalization than those in CVN and CṼ words. However, prior work examining phonological neighborhood effects on vowel nasalization patterns on coarticulated vowels in French found that, while there was no lexical difficulty effect on vowels in anticipatory coarticulatory contexts (VN), there was increased degree of coarticulation in carryover contexts (NṼ) in words with a larger number of phonological competitors (Scarborough 2004). One question is whether the increased coarticulation in NV words is motivated to make the vowels more distinct from CV lexical competitors, specifically. This is an open question and a ripe direction for future work examining phonological effects on coarticulatory variation in French.