Durational effects in final lengthening, gapping, and contrastive stress

Lengthening in utterance-final position and in contrastive stress was examined in Hebrew, focusing on the distribution of the durational effect across syllables and within the final syllable. Initially-stressed and finally-stressed bisyllabic key words were read in sentence-final versus nonfinal position, and in contrastive stress versus nonstressed constructions. The results were compared with data from an earlier study of verb gapping. Contrastive stress showed a smaller effect than final lengthening and verb gapping, consistent with the claim that other acoustic parameters are more prominently involved in this process. Utterance-final lengthening and verb gapping principally affected the final syllable regardless of stress, whereas contrastive stress primarily lengthened the stressed syllable. The pattern of progressively greater lengthening within the utterance-final syllable, previously found for stressed syllables, applied to unstressed syllables as well. The finding that target syllables in sentence-final position are characterized by progressive lengthening, unlike those in contrastive stress and gapping, supports the suggestion that utterance-final lengthening is a reflection of deceleration at the end of motor activity. Durational measures of individual syllables within the key word, and of segments in addition to the vocalic portion of the final syllable, reveal differences in the acoustic implementation of different lengthening processes.