Syllable duration and discourse organization at intonational phrase boundaries in Taiwan Southern Min

This study examined syllable duration at discourse boundaries in spontaneous speech in Taiwan Southern Min with an eight-hour monologue corpus contributed by sixteen speakers, evenly split by gender and age. In order to control for prosodic boundary type, we only examined discourse boundaries coincided with an intonational phrase boundary followed by a pause. In addition, to tease apart the the possible effect of final particles, we subset the data according to whether a boundary was marked with a final particle. Results showed a disyllabic domain for pre-boundary lengthening in the dataset without final particles and a trisyllabic domain in the dataset with final particles. In addition, overall, syllable duration at the pre-boundary position showed an inverse relationship with discourse boundary strength, especially in young speakers’ speech.