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Disambiguating durational cues for speech segmentation

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

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<mark>Journal publication date</mark>07/2013
<mark>Journal</mark>Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Issue number1
Volume134
Number of pages7
Pages (from-to)EL45-51
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Vowels are lengthened in lexically stressed syllables and also in word-final syllables. Both stress and final-syllable lengthening can assist in word segmentation from continuous speech, but in languages like English, with a preponderance of stress-initial words, lengthening cues may conflict for indicating word boundaries. An analysis of a large corpus of English speech demonstrated that speakers provide distributional information sufficient to potentially allow listeners to determine whether vowel lengthening is associated with lexical stress or word finality without relying on a congruence of multiple suprasegmental cues to make the distinction.