WPP, No. 106: Effects of Initial Position versus Prominence in English

UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics No. 106, pp. 1-33 Effects of initial position versus prominence in English Taehong Cho Hanyang University, Korea tcho@hanyang.ac.kr Patricia Keating keating@humnet.ucla.edu Abstract This study investigates effects of three prosodic factors—prosodic boundary (Utterance-initial vs. Utterance-medial), lexical stress (primary vs. secondary) and phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented)—on articulatory and acoustic realizations of word-initial CVs (/ne/, /te/) in trisyllabic English words. Articulatory measurements include linguopalatal contact (by electropalatography) for both C and V, and seal duration; 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/. Several specific points emerge. First, domain-initial articulation is differentiated from stress- or accent-induced articulations in many aspects; for the most part, prominence affects vowel measures while initial position affects consonant measures. Nonetheless, the vowel is also effectively louder domain-initially, suggesting that the boundary effect is not strictly local to the initial consonant. Second, the boundary (domain-initial) effect is not seen across-the-board, but is often constrained by stress and accent factors, revealing that domain-initial strengthening is more effective when a relevant phonetic dimension does not undergo a compelling strengthening coming from stress or accent. Third, some accentual effects can be seen on secondary-stressed syllables, suggesting that accentual influences spread beyond the primary-stressed syllable. But this spread is mainly seen with consonantal measures, showing an asymmetric accentual influence between consonantal and vocalic articulations. 1. Introduction Prosodic structure has been widely recognized as an essential element of speech production, as it conveys a great deal of both structural and discourse information (Selkirk, 1995; Swerts & Geluykens, 1994; Herman, 2000). A large body of phonetic studies in the past two decades has increasingly demonstrated the importance of fine-grained phonetic detail in building up differential prosodic structures of utterances. One of the most conspicuous phonetic hallmarks of prosodic structure is domain-final lengthening (e.g. Klatt, 1975; Wightman et al., 1992; Gussenhoven & Rietveld, 1992, Edwards, Beckman & Fletcher, 1991; Cho, 2002, 2006; Byrd,