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Updated: May 21, 2026

Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
Published on: September 27, 2024
Additive effects of lengthening on the utterance-final word in child-directed speech
Eon-Suk Ko1, Melanie Soderstrom
1University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA. eonsukko@buffalo.edu
Purpose:
The authors investigated lengthening effects in child-directed speech (CDS) across the sentence, testing the additive effects on duration of Word Position, Register, Focus, and Sentence Mode (statement/question).
Method:
Five theater students produced 6 sentences containing 5 monosyllabic words in a simulated dialogue, varying in Register, Focus, and Sentence Mode. The authors segmented a total of 1,800 sentences using forced-alignment tools, and they analyzed the duration of each word.
Results:
The results show significant effects of Register, Word Position, and their interactions. The simple effect of Register was significant in all 5 word positions, indicating a global elongation effect in CDS. Interestingly, there was no proportional increase of the final word in CDS. In addition, the 3-way interactions Register × Word Position × Focus and Register × Word Position × Sentence Mode were significant, which converge to the conclusion that the utterance-final word in CDS is additively elongated when it is focused and in a statement.
Conclusion:
Elongation in CDS is a global effect, but the additive effects of duration demonstrated in the authors' data suggest that the effect of enhanced utterance-final lengthening in CDS in naturalistic samples may be a by-product of discourse characteristics of CDS.
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