l'Univers(i)té

In a comment on yesterday's post ("High vowel lenition/devoicing in French"), carveuir wrote:

Ha! As a final-year undergraduate in 2015, I mentioned having come across devoicing of the second /i/ in "université" to my French linguistics tutor and he didn't believe me. Finally I've been vindicated.

My impression is that this is common and perhaps almost categorical in Québecois vernacular, but more gradient (or maybe I should say less complete?) in Parisian French. So I looked from some examples of the word université in a collection of transcribed radio broadcasts and political speeches from France. And I found a few, all of which were consistent with my impression. So my recent series of French phonetic anecdotes continues below.

Here's the first example I found:

dans le domaine de l'université in the sector of the university

Your browser does not support the audio element.

In the waveform plot below, I've circles the syllables /ni/ and /si/ in université. And comparing the performance of second /i/  with that of the first one, we see that it's partly devoiced (in its second half):

The preceding [s] is also somewhat lengthened (about 160 msec.), suggesting that there's some overlap/assimilation with the following vowel, whose voiced part is rather short (about 70 msec.).

The F0 of the voiced part of that second /i/ is pretty much at the same level as that of the first one:

However, the amplitude is much lower (peak at 80.54 dB compared to 70.55 dB, or nearly 10 dB lower):

And as we would expect, the second /i/'s spectral balance is strongly tilted towards higher frequencies:

No doubt that whole vowel might sometimes be devoiced in faster and less formal speech, especially with less vocal effort — thus completing carveuir's vindication.