14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Correlation between Segmental Reduction and Prosodic Features in Spontaneous Speech: The Role of Tempo

Francesco Cutugno, Renata Savy

CIRASS - University of Naples "Federico II", Italy

This work aims to point out some relations between segmental reduction and suprasegmental structures in Italian.
   Following a previous study that observed an increase of reduction probability to occur after a pitch or nuclear accent in the tone-unit, we tried to verify the existence of relations between the amount of reduction and speech-rate variation in pre-accent and post-accent positions, introducing the notion of local speech rate (l-SR) as the pattern of the inverse values of syllable duration.
   In a first stage, we classified three different l-SR patterns in the considered positions. In a second stage, we calculated the percentage of reductions occurring in each part of the scheme and the relation with the l-SR patterns.
   Final results show that, although a coincidence of greater amount of reduction in post-accent positions with increasing tendency of l-SR does exist, it is not systematic; l-SR decrease is not able to inhibit reduction.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cutugno, Francesco / Savy, Renata (1999): "Correlation between segmental reduction and prosodic features in spontaneous speech: the role of tempo", In ICPhS-14, 471-474.