Quantitative Intervocalic Relations: Evidence for Foot Structure

Abstract

AbstractThe paper discusses intriguing differences between the acoustic characteristics of stressed vowels placed in different prosodic contexts. We have analysed the recordings of speakers of SBrE. The experimental design was as follows. Two male native speakers of Southern British English read 162 mono-, di- and trisyllabic words made of CV sequences. The target items were presented in two contexts: (i) isolated and (ii) phrase-final. The stressed syllables contained all RP vowels and diphthongs, followed by a voiced obstruent, a voiceless obstruent and a sonorant. Vowels were then extracted from target words and their duration, pitch and intensity were measured with PRAAT. Pitch and intensity measurements included three parameters: mean/max values and the intravocalic slope. The total number of observations was 9072. The significance of various types of differences was tested with one-way ANOVA and correlation tests. The results suggest that there exist significant discrepancies between the properties of stressed vowels which depend on the distance between the stressed vowel and the end of the word. These differences on the one hand follow from general laws of speech aerodynamics and on the other serve as important cues in word recognition process.KeywordsVowel DurationUnstressed SyllableContour ToneStressed VowelTarget VowelThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.