Effects of syllable affiliation and consonant voicing on temporal adjustment in a repetitive speech-production task

This paper presents the results of an acoustic speech-production experiment in which speakers repeated simple syllabic forms varying in consonantal voicing in time to a metronome that controlled repetition rate. Speakers exhibited very different patterns of tempo control for syllables with onsets than for syllables with codas. Syllables with codas exhibited internal temporal consistency, leaving junctures between the repeated syllables to take up most of the tempo variation. Open syllables with onsets, by contrast, often exhibited nearly proportional scaling of all of the acoustic portions of the signal. Results also suggest that phonemic use of vowel duration as a cue to voicing acted to constrain temporal patterns with some speakers. These results are discussed with respect to possible models of local temporal adjustment within a context of global timing constraints.