In Laurentian French (LF), the high vowels /i y u/ are realized as lax [ɪ ʏ ʊ] in syllables closed by certain consonants. Previous work on vowel laxing has focused primarily on describing the environments in which it occurs and on providing an acoustic characterization of the process, with far less work considering laxing from an articulatory perspective. This study uses acoustic and articulatory data (via ultrasound tongue imaging) to answer two main research questions: (1) Do high vowels in laxing environments centralize and lower or just lower? and (2) Does laxing occur before the rhotic /ʁ/? For the first question, our results show that LF high vowels become both lower and more centralized when they are realized as lax. For the second, our results showed that all three vowels are produced farther back when they precede a rhotic, which could be an instance of C-to-V coarticulation, rather than laxing.

Eastern Andalusian Spanish (EAS), spoken in southern Spain, is characterized by the loss of most word-final consonants in casual speech. This deletion leads to adjacent vowel laxing which, in turn, drives harmony: the open quality of the final vowel spreads leftwards to the stressed syllable, as in beso [ˈbe.so] ‘kiss, sg’ vs. besos [ˈbɛ.sɔ] ‘kiss, pl’ (Navarro Tomás 1939; Rodríguez Castellano & Palacio 1948; among others). While the nature of triggers (deletion of -s) and targets (stressed syllables) has been assumed, other patterns remain understudied. For this study, I recorded 18 EAS speakers’ production of oxytonic words containing two mid vowels, with and without underlying final -r/-s (e.g., triplets such as bebé ‘baby’, beber ‘to drink’, and bebés ‘babies’). First and second formants of final and penultimate vowels were extracted. Participants also completed a perception experiment, where they had to match a written word with a recording ending in unpronounced -r, -s, or bare vowel. Results show that deletion of -r and -s produce comparable changes in the two preceding vowels; final vowels become lax, and preceding vowels undergo harmony. Speakers can also identify whether a word ends in an underlying consonant, as well as determining which (-r or -s) above chance (albeit with limited success). These results suggest that EAS harmony (a) is stress-independent and (b) can be triggered by deletion of fricatives and liquids. I propose V-to-V coarticulation as a potential origin of harmony in EAS, aligning with its role as the most common cause of harmony cross-linguistically.