Metrical phonology in speech production

Abstract

The theory of metrical phonology has been devised in an attempt to capture a variety of aspects of rhythmic patterns in speech. To date, however, very few of the theory's claims have been tested empirically. In this study, assertions made by E. O. Selkirk (1984, Phonology and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) and by B. Hayes (1984, Linguistic Inquiry, Vol. 15, pp. 33–74) are tested in five experiments of English speech production. In each experiment, a different group of speakers produced short phrases or sentences containing key words which may undergo stress retraction, depending on the stress pattern of the following word. The stress patterns of the key words were assessed by perceptual evaluation and by acoustical analysis of fundamental frequency and segmental duration. The tests uniformly fail to provide support for claims about stress clashing and retraction in English, whereas other results are in accord with previous acoustical studies.