15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Lexical Stress, Phrasal Accent and Prosodic Boundary in the Realization of Domain-Initial Stops in Dutch

Taehong Cho

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands

This study examines the effects of prosodic boundaries, lexical stress, and phrasal accent on the acoustic realization of stops (/t, d/) in Dutch, with special attention paid to language-specificity in the phonetics-prosody interface. The results obtained from various acoustic measures show systematic phonetic variations in the production of /t d/ as a function of prosodic position, which may be interpreted as being due to prosodically-conditioned articulatory strengthening. Shorter VOTs were found for the voiceless stop /t/ in prosodically stronger locations (as opposed to longer VOTs in this position in English). The results suggest that prosodically-driven phonetic realization is bounded by a language-specific phonological feature system.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cho, Taehong (2003): "Lexical stress, phrasal accent and prosodic boundary in the realization of domain-initial stops in Dutch", In ICPhS-15, 2657-2660.