14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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.
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.