S Duration: Methodological Influences and Linguistic Variables

Abstract

Abstract Durational characteristics of [s] were estimated as a function of two experimental tasks, i.e. reading and delayed imitation. In the two tasks, each of six subjects produced 25 tokens of /s/; the s segments were embedded in sentences, and were controlled for location of lexical stress and syllable and morpheme boundaries. In addition, phonetic context effects on [s] were controlled. Results indicate that the reading task introduces exaggerated duration effects relative to those observed in delayed imitation. For example, the hypothesis that an underlying double s may account for longer [s] in the first member of stimulus pairs such as misstep-mistake was shown to be true under the reading condition but not the delayed imitation condition.