Effects of metrical foot structure on syllable timing.

Abstract

The durations of syllabic intervals in sentences with different rhythmic structure were examined. Rhythmic structure was defined as the organization of stressed and unstressed syllables into metrical feet — in this case, iambs and anapests. Each sentence contained three metrical feet, and each foot could be either an iamb or an anapest; hence, there were eight sentences of different rhythm types. Six. native speakers of American English each read 24 versions of each of the 8 rhythm types (192 sentences). The utterances were recorded and the durations of each syllable of each foot were measured from sound spectrograms. Statistical analysis indicated that the durations of some syllables were affected by the structure of the foot that contained them. There was also, in most cases, a significant shortening of the stressed syllable of a foot when the following foot was an anapest rather than an iamb. The results were interpreted as indicating that the process by which speech is produced is not strictly concatenative but involves planning which extends to at least two metrical feet at a time.