The duration of stop consonants

Abstract

It is well known that the duration of a stop consonant in the intervocalic, poststressed position may serve as a cue to that stop's voicing characteristic [L. Lisker, Lang. 33, 42–49 (1957)]. More recent research has suggested that when stop‐closure durations are examined in a variety of positions, the voiceless stops have greater duration than the voiced stops only in the intervocalic, poststressed position [L. Lisker in A. Valdman [Ed.], Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics to the Memory of Pierre Delattre, 339–343 (1972)]. The present research was designed to provide additional data on stop‐closure durations as a function of (1) voicing, (2) stress, (3) vowel context, and (4) place of articulation. Six subjects produced a series of nonsense disyllables of the form CVCVC in a carrier phrase; for each disyllable, one consonant was a “test consonant” and the other two were controls. The test consonant was systematically varied with respect to voicing, stress and position‐in‐disyllable. Vowels in the disyllable were also varied systematically within the stressed syllable, and included /i/, /l/, u/, and /ae/. Preliminary analyses show that for some subjects, the dorsal stops are affected by stress and position differently than are the apicals and bilabials.