Effects of syllable and word structure on segmental durations in spoken Italian

Abstract

In the present study the temporal aspects of syllables and words in spoken Italian are investigated. As for the syllables we tested the effects of syllable composition on the acoustic duration of vowels and consonants. the effects of word structure on segmental durations were tested by varying the word size and the position of lexical stress. The results indicate that both syllable structure and word structure have systematic effects on the duration of vowels and consonants. The effects of syllable structure and word size are primarily anticipatory, and are in the direction required for preserving the total duration of these units. Two points are made in the present paper: the syllable data suggest that the unit tending to be constant in duration is the temporal interval from vowel onset. The data relative to syllable and word would indicate that the durational variations due to these variables are realized by two different articulatory strategies. A few observations are made on syllable- and stress-timing.