An acoustic study of the effects of tempo and stress on segmental intervals in Modern Greek

Changes in stress and rate of speech have been shown to have different effects on the durations of speech intervals. We examined the effects of such changes on syllable and intrasyllabic segment durations in the word-initial syllable of three-syllable words in Modern Greek, and in conflict with previously reported results for other languages, found rate and stress to have equal effects. We propose that languages may differ in terms of temporal programming in the same sense as they differ in terms of syntactic or phonological rule systems.