14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
It has been claimed that segments are strongly articulated in two prosodic positions: pitch-accented syllables and domaininitial positions. The current study examines the effect of these two prosodic conditions on resistance to vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, based on acoustic data. This study first shows that vowels are strongly articulated at the edges of prosodic domains. The degree of V-to-V coarticulation is in general greater when vowels are separated by a lower prosodic boundary (e.g., a word boundary), and it smaller when they are separated by a higher prosodic boundary (e.g., an Intonational Phrase boundary). A greater V-to-V coarticulation was found when the vowels have no pitch accent. Overall, vowels in prosodically stronger positions resist coarticulation.
Bibliographic reference. Cho, Taehong (1999): "Effect of prosody on vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English", In ICPhS-14, 459-462.