Consonant Doubling, Vowel Lengthening and English Stress

Abstract

This paper aims to see whether spelling of words, more specifically consonant doubling, affects the way stress is assigned and how novel orthographic stimuli are pronounced with focus on the vowel quality and quantity. For the purpose, a small experiment was conducted with 15 trisyllabic nonsense words such as Podory/Poddory/Podorry and 5 native speakers of English. Stress locations were marked and vowel quality and quantity of stressed syllables were recorded. The results suggest that there is no double consonant effect on stress assignment in English nonsense words. Besides, contrary to the prediction of the English Stress Rules, overall, speakers preferred the penultimate syllable stress. This result seems to be confusing because they do not follow the English Stress Rules. However, measurement of the vowel length suggests that the subjects treat the penultimate syllables differently from the antepenultimate syllables, supporting the idea that the subjects have the knowledge of the English Stress Rule, indeed. Though the speakers keep the same vowel quality in both stressed penultimate and stressed antepenultimate syllables, they distinguish them by vowel lengthening; the speakers articulate the antepenultimate vowels with short duration when they assign stress on the antepenultimate syllable. Interestingly enough, however, they lengthen the vowel of the penultimate syllable when they assign stress on the penultimate syllable. Accordingly, it can be concluded that the implicit knowledge of English stress rule, supposed to be internalized in native speakers’ mind, exerts influence on the pronunciation of the nonsense words.