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).
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