Durational Effects of Stress, Accent, and Voicing on the Preceding Word-final Syllable in English

This study examined how duration of an unstressed final syllable in English is affected by conditions in the following word: stress (trochaic/iambic), accent (accented/unaccented), and initial stop voicing (voiced/voiceless). Results showed that the unstressed final syllable was shorter before an unstressed syllable, presumably due to polysyllabic shortening—i.e., the following unstressed syllable forms a foot with the preceding syllable. This effect, however, disappeared when the following word was accented, due to foot restructuring caused by leftward spreading of accent effect—i.e., because the (following) unstressed syllable is lengthened when accented, it is no longer weak enough to be associated with the preceding foot. The lengthening of the word-final syllable before a voiced stop was also observed, but only within a foot. Most of the foot restructuring effects disappeared across an IP boundary. Interestingly, however, even across an IP boundary, the final syllable was affected by accentuation of the following word (i.e., shortened before an accented word), implying that the prominence structure may have a more global effect.