Additive Effects of Phrase Boundary on English Accented Vowels
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper investigates cumulative effects of strengthening and lengthening on English vowels across two prominencebearing prosodic factors, phrasal accent and prosodic phrase boundary. F1, F2 and duration measures are compared across vowels in three prosodic contexts: ip-medial unaccented, ipmedial accented, and ip-final accented. The results show that for most vowels there is only one degree of vowel strengthening, conditioned by phrasal accent, without any additive strengthening effect of prosodic phrase boundary. Lengthening is observed in both accent and added phrase boundary conditions, and the effect is consistently cumulative for at least some vowels, suggesting a gradient increase of duration as a function of the strength of prosodic structure. This finding also provides compelling evidence that strengthening and lengthening effects are two independent mechanisms that serve to mark prosodically strong positions.
منابع مشابه
Effect of Prosody on Vowel-to-vowel Coarticulation in English
It has been claimed that segments are 'strongly' articulated in two prosodic positions: pitch-accented syllables [4, 5] and domaininitial positions [3, 6, 7, 9]. The current study examines the effect of these two prosodic conditions on resistance to vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, based on acoustic data. This study first shows that vowels are strongly articulated at the edges of prosodic domains...
متن کاملEffects of intonational phrase boundaries on pitch-accented syllables in american English
Recent studies of the acoustic correlates of various prosodic elements in American English, such as prominence (in the form of phrase-level pitch accents and word-level lexical stress) and boundaries (in the form of boundary-marking tones), have begun to clarify the nature of the acoustic cues to different types and levels of these prosodic markers. This study focuses on the importance of contr...
متن کاملThe Effects of Language Experience and Speech Context on the Phonetic Accommodation of English-accented Spanish Voicing.
Native speakers of Spanish with different amounts of experience with English classified stop-consonant voicing (/b/ versus /p/) across different speech accents: English-accented Spanish, native Spanish, and native English. While listeners with little experience with English classified target voicing with an English- or Spanish-like voice onset time (VOT) boundary, predicted by contextual VOT, l...
متن کاملIntelligibility and acoustic correlates of Japanese accented English vowels
To produce near-native American English (AE) vowels, Japanese speakers must extend their five vowel system with at least six new vowels. Three experiments have been conducted to acquire both perceptual and acoustic measures about Japanese accented English (JE)vowels. Six non-back vowels of AE in several phonetic environments were recorded from four Japanese male talkers with moderate English sk...
متن کاملDuration and intensity as perceptual cues for naïve listeners’ prominence and boundary perception
I investigate the acoustic correlates of prosodic prominence and boundary, as they are perceived by naïve listeners, in spontaneous speech from American English (Buckeye corpus). Prosodic prominence and phrasing serve different functions in speech communication: prosodic phrase boundaries demarcate speech chunks that typically cohere semantically, while prominences encode focus and possibly als...
متن کامل