Abstract
The duration of a stressed syllable is shortened when it is immediately followed by an unstressed syllable. Previous work showed that this effect operates across word boundaries but is diminished in magnitude by the presence of an intervening syntactic boundary. In this study, the durations of key segments within stressed syllables were measured in sentence pairs containing a matched phonetic environment. The results for ten speakers showed that the shortening effect was blocked in the presence of a number of major syntactic boundaries, including the boundaries between a noun phrase (NP) and a prepositional phrase (PP), between two PP's, and between a NP or PP and a separate clause. Lesser syntactic boundaries, including the boundaries between a verb and NP direct object and between an NP direct object and NP indirect object, did not block the shortening rule. The magnitude of the blocking effect did not depend on the transformational history or internal structure of the syntactic constituents as much as on the boundary type.
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