08 Feb 2005

Mariko Sugahara & Alice Turk

One of the universal aspects of speech is that speakers manipulate acoustic parameters to mark linguistic boundaries. For example, it is well-documented that word-final segments and syllables are longer when immediately followed by higher order linguistic boundaries such as sentence/utterance and phrase boundaries than when followed by no such boundaries (Cooper & Cooper; Whiteman et al 1992 among many others). Recent work by Turk and colleagues (Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel 2000; Turk & Sawusch 1997; Turk & White 1999) and Beckman & Edwards (1990) have further shown that segmental duration adjustment is also affected by the presence or absence of a word-level constituent boundaries in two-word sequences. Those ³near-boundary² duration adjustments are then taken as good evidence for the prosodic constituents proposed at and above the word-level. It is, however, not yet clear whether such near-boundary duration adjustment is found at sub-lexical (within-word) levels, especially at within-word feet and at within-word prosodic words. The main goal of this study is to examine whether there is any duration-based evidence for those sub-lexical constituents in English. We obtained results supporting the within-word prosodic word boundary while no supporting evidence was found for the within-word foot.

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