Stochastic Suprasegmentals: Relationships between Redundancy, Prosodic Structure and Syllabic Duration

Prosodic Prominence and prosodic boundaries have been shown to effect syllabic durations. However another factor, redundancy, also appears to have a major impact. More common words and words you can easily predict from context (more redundant) tend to be articulated less clearly and so also have a tendency to have shortened syllabic durations. This paper explores the relationship between measures of redundancy, prosodic structure and syllabic duration of a large corpus of spontaneous speech. Although 50% (r=0.71) of syllable variation is predictable from measures of accentedness, break index and other prosodic parameters, word frequency alone predicts 11% of the duration variation. Combining prosodic information and redundancy measurements improves prediction by 0.75% (r=0.72), suggesting that although redundancy measurements can offer a statistically independent contribution to predicting syllabic duration, prosodic structure implicitly represents most of the variation caused by redundancy.