Durational effects in final lengthening, gapping, and contrastive stress

Area of Science:

• Phonetics
• Linguistics
• Speech Science

Background:

• Prosodic phenomena, such as lengthening, are crucial for speech production and perception.
• Understanding durational variations in Hebrew prosody offers insights into universal speech patterns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the acoustic properties of lengthening in Hebrew, specifically in utterance-final position and contrastive stress.
• To compare the distribution of durational effects across syllables and within the final syllable for different prosodic conditions.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of bisyllabic keywords in Hebrew, varying stress placement (initial vs. final) and sentence position (final vs. non-final).
• Comparison of lengthening effects in contrastive stress vs. non-stressed conditions.
• Examination of durational measures across syllables and within the final syllable, including segmental durations.

Main Results:

• Utterance-final lengthening and verb gapping predominantly impacted the final syllable, irrespective of stress.
• Contrastive stress primarily lengthened the stressed syllable, showing a smaller overall effect compared to final lengthening.
• Progressive lengthening within the final syllable was observed in utterance-final position for both stressed and unstressed syllables.

Conclusions:

• Utterance-final lengthening in Hebrew reflects motor activity deceleration, affecting syllables progressively.
• Different prosodic processes (final lengthening, contrastive stress, verb gapping) exhibit distinct acoustic implementations and syllable targeting.
• Acoustic analysis of syllable and segmental durations reveals nuanced differences in lengthening mechanisms.