Effects of initial position versus prominence in English

This study investigates effects of three prosodic factors—prosodic boundary (Utterance-initial vs. Utterance-medial), lexical stress (primary vs. secondary) and phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented)—on articulatory and acoustic realizations of word-initial CVs (/nε/, /tε/) in trisyllabic English words. Articulatory measurements include linguopalatal contact (by electropalatography) for both C and V, and seal duration; acoustic measurements include nasal duration and energy for /n/, VOT, burst energy and spectral center of gravity for /t/, and F1, vowel duration and vowel amplitude for /ε/. Several specific points emerge. First, domain-initial articulation is differentiated from stressor accent-induced articulations in many aspects; for the most part, prominence affects vowel measures while initial position affects consonant measures. Nonetheless, the vowel is also effectively louder domain-initially, suggesting that the boundary effect is not strictly local to the initial consonant. Second, the boundary (domain-initial) effect is not seen across-the-board, but is often constrained by stress and accent factors, revealing that domain-initial strengthening is more effective when a relevant phonetic dimension does not undergo a compelling strengthening coming from stress or accent. Third, some accentual effects can be seen on secondary-stressed syllables, suggesting that accentual influences spread beyond the primary-stressed syllable. But this spread is mainly seen with consonantal measures, showing an asymmetric accentual influence between consonantal and vocalic articulations.