Articulatory Data on Preboundary Lengthening Across Prominence Conditions in American English

Abstract

This article presents articulatory–kinematic data on preboundary lengthening (Intonational Phrase-final lengthening) from the productions of ten native speakers of American English—a relatively rare class of phonetic data compared with the more widely available acoustic data. The dataset includes three trisyllabic nonce words (bábaba, babába, bababá), each designed to manipulate the location of lexical stress. These were produced under prosodic conditions that varied in boundary position and focus-induced phrasal prominence, enabling analysis of how preboundary lengthening is distributed across words with different lexical stress locations and how it interacts with prosodic prominence. Articulatory data were collected using electromagnetic articulography (EMA, Carstens AG200), providing kinematic measurements such as movement duration, peak velocity, and displacement of articulatory gestures. The accompanying files allow examination of individual speaker variation in these measures as modulated by prosodic structure, including boundary and prominence effects. While theoretical findings have been reported in a previous study, the full dataset, including detailed descriptions of individual speaker patterns, is made available here. By making these less commonly available articulatory data publicly available, we aim to promote broad reuse and support further research in prosody, articulatory phonetics, and speech production.