ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002

Crosslinguistic segmental durations and prosodic typology

Antonis Botinis, Robert Bannert, Marios Fourakis, Stamatia Pagoni-Tetlow

The present study is an experimental investigation of the effects of syllable position, stress, focus and tempo on segmental durations in American English, British English, Greek and Swedish. Nonsense disyllabic CVCV words were produced in a carrier sentence under different conditions of stress, focus and tempo. The results indicate that stress and tempo have a major effect on both consonant and vowel across all four languages, whereas the effects of syllable position and focus are hardly evident. Significant interactions were mostly found between syllable position and stress for the vowel.