Influence of prosodic factors on segment articulations and acoustics in English

Abstract

This study investigated effects of three prosodic factors?prosodic boundary, lexical stress, and accent?on articulatory and acoustic realizations of two CV syllables, /nE/ and /tE/. These syllables occurred at the beginning of trisyllabic English nonwords; their position in the larger phrase (prosodic boundary conditions), and whether they were lexically stressed and/or accented (prominence conditions) were varied. Articulatory measurements included linguopalatal contact (by electropalatography) for both C and V, stop consonant seal duration, and C-to-V contact difference; 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 /E/. We tested whether domain-initial strengthening occurs in the C and/or the V segments independently of stress or accent conditions. We found that the effects of position and of stress/accent can be distinguished in the production and the acoustics of these syllables. One domain-initial effect (greater consonant contact domain-initially) was complementary to one stress/accent effect (greater vowel opening with stress/accent); in other cases the effects overlapped (greater vowel energy and tendency to longer consonant both domain-initially and with stress/accent); in one case they conflicted (less consonant energy domain-initially, more consonant energy with stress/accent).