The phonetic effects of onset complexity on the English syllable

Abstract

In English, onset segments of the syllable do not participate in the categorical criteria which determine phonological syllable weight, yet they probabilistically impact stress assignment in novel words and influence the composition of weight-based metric verse (Kelly 2004, Ryan 2014). Together these observations suggest a phonetic motivation for the role that onsets play in English’s phonological syllable weight system, investigated here. Using 20 rhyming sets of single syllable words minimally differing in onset material (i.e., rap, trap, strap), this production study replicates results from the literature showing that the addition of segmental material to the onset accompanies a decrease in vowel duration (Gordon 2005, Ryan 2014). Furthermore, results show that the pitch and amplitude maxima of the syllable occur earlier within syllables containing more onset segments. Pitch and amplitude maxima have previously been implicated in perceptually based accounts of syllable weight (Goedemans 1998), and since stimuli were controlled for stress and categorical weight, these results suggest that the phonetic effects observed reflect general acoustic properties of onset complexity in the language. For these reasons, findings reported here suggest that perceptual acoustic effects intrinsic to onset complexity are exploited by the weight system of English despite exclusion from its categorical criteria.