Effects of initial position versus prominence in English

Abstract

This study investigates effects of three prosodic factors—prosodic boundary (Utterance-initial vs. Utterance-medial), lexical stress (primary vs. secondary) and phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented)—on articulatory and acoustic realizations of word-initial CVs (/nε/, /tε/) in trisyllabic English words. The consonantal measures were linguopalatal Peak contact and Release contacts (by electropalatography), Seal duration, Nasal duration and Nasal energy for /n/, VOT, RMS burst energy and spectral Center of Gravity at the release for /t/; and the vocalic measures were linguopalatal Vowel contact, Vowel F1, Vowel duration and Vowel amplitude. Several specific points emerge. Firstly, domain-initial articulation is differentiated from stress- or accent-induced articulations along several measures. Secondly, the vowel is effectively louder domain-initially, suggesting that the boundary effect is not strictly local to the initial consonant. Thirdly, some accentual effects can be seen in secondary-stressed syllables, suggesting that accentual influences spread beyond the primary-stressed syllable. Finally, unlike domain-initial effects, prominence effects are not cumulative. Thus we conclude that, at least for the kind of word-initial syllables tested here, different aspects of prosodic structure (domain boundary vs. prominence) are differentially encoded.