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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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Prosodic Prominence and prosodic boundaries have been shown
to effect syllabic durations. However another factor, redundancy,
also appears to have a major impact. More common words and
words you can easily predict from context (more redundant) tend
to be articulated less clearly and so also have a tendency to have
shortened syllabic durations.
This paper explores the relationship between measures of redundancy,
prosodic structure and syllabic duration of a large corpus
of spontaneous speech. Although 50% (r=0.71) of syllable
variation is predictable from measures of accentedness, break index
and other prosodic parameters, word frequency alone predicts
11% of the duration variation. Combining prosodic information
and redundancy measurements improves prediction by 0.75%
(r=0.72), suggesting that although redundancy measurements can
offer a statistically independent contribution to predicting syllabic
duration, prosodic structure implicitly represents most of the variation
caused by redundancy.
Bibliographic reference. Aylett, Matthew P. (1999): "Stochastic suprasegmentals: relationships between redundancy, prosodic structure and syllabic duration", In ICPhS-14, 289-292.