Perception and production of final consonants: Some thoughts on the monosyllabic status of Vietnamese

Résumé En

Vietnamese belongs to the Mon-Khmer language group in the Austroasiatic family and is traditionally described as an ‘isolating’ language, in which all the words are invariable (no change in its forms) and each syllable generally has an independent meaning in isolation (Đoàn, 1999; Trương, 1970). Many authors describe the Vietnamese as a monosyllabic language (see e.g. Nguyễn, 1989). However, others argue that Vietnamese words are not monosyllabic in all cases. A significant number of polysyllabic words can be found at the lexical level (51.74% of the 5000 most commonly used Vietnamese words) (Trần & Vallée, 2009). Addionally, Michaud (2004) remarks that the Vietnamese language only is phonologically monosyllabic, but partially polysyllabic at the lexical level. Simple words are monosyllabic and differ from compound words only in the number of syllables (Trương, 1970; Nguyễn, 1999). Vietnamese syllable structure is presented as C1(w)VC2 (the brackets indicating the optional constituents) (Đoàn, 1999). The language licenses only eight segments /p t k m n N j w/ in coda position in which three voiceless obstruents are unreleased (Cao, 1985; Đoàn, 1999; Kirby, 2011). As a result, C2 can be found at inter-word boundaries (CVC2#CVC) or, in disyllables, at intra-word boundaries (CVC2.C3VC). I shall present two experimental studies that are conducted in order to verify if there is any impact of boundary type (intra-word vs. inter-word) on the realization and perception of final consonants. The obtained results clearly show the existence of an effect of boundary type on final consonants. A word boundary is acoustically and perceptually different from a syllable boundary within a compound word. This finding leads us to question the monosyllabic status of Vietnamese language. Significant differences of phonetic characteristics of final consonants in monosyllables and dissyllables could establish that Vietnamese is not a monosyllabic language and that dissyllables have their own prosodic status rather than being simple juxtapositions.