Modulation of phonetic duration by morphological and lexical predictors.

Abstract

This study investigates how the duration of the stem vowel of regular and irregular English verbs is modulated by tense (present and past), regularity, lexical frequency, gang size of the vocalic alternation, imageability ratings, and vowel quality. The vocalic durations of 48 monosyllabic irregular verbs and 171 regular verbs were extracted from the Buckeye Corpus of spontaneous speech. A linear mixed effects regression model revealed that vowels of past tense forms tend to have longer durations than vowels of present tense forms, that vowels of words that are less imageable are realized with shorter durations, and that tense vowels are longer than lax vowels. Surprisingly, higher frequency irregular past tense forms were produced with longer vowels, contradicting Aylett and Turk [(2004); (2006)] and Bell et al. [(2003); (2009)]. Further, vowels were shorter for irregular verbs with larger vocalic alternation gangs, contradicting the predictions of Kuperman et al. [(2007)] but supporting hypotheses that ...