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Related Experiment Video

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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody

Published on: September 27, 2024

Word-internal versus word-peripheral consonantal duration patterns in three languages.

Melissa A Redford¹

¹Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, USA. redford@uoregon.edu

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

|April 6, 2007

Summary

This study reveals that speech planning units are language-specific. English shows stronger effects across word boundaries, suggesting words are key planning units in English speech production.

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Area of Science:

Phonetics
Linguistics
Speech Production

Background:

Syllables are traditionally considered basic speech planning units.
Previous research often confounds syllable and word boundaries in production experiments.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate consonantal duration patterns at word-internal and word-peripheral boundaries.
To compare speech planning units across English, Russian, and Finnish.
To determine the role of the word as a planning unit in speech production.

Main Methods:

Compared consonantal duration patterns within and at the edges of words.
Utilized stress and sequencing to manipulate boundary locations in disyllabic nonsense words.
Analyzed American English, Russian, and Finnish speech productions.

Main Results:

All languages exhibited similar stress and sequencing effects on consonant duration.
English showed an independent effect of syllable position only at word boundaries.
English displayed stronger stress and sequencing effects across word boundaries compared to within words.

Conclusions:

Suprasegmental units of motor planning are language-specific.
The word appears to be a more significant planning unit in English than previously thought.
Cross-linguistic differences in speech planning units were identified.