English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

The final lengthening of pre-boundary syllables turns into final shortening as boundary strength levels increase

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons215741

Kentner,  Gerrit
Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany;
Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons220090

Franz,  Isabelle
Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;
Hochschule für Gesundheit;

/persons/resource/persons130450

Knoop,  Christine A.       
Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;

/persons/resource/persons130297

Menninghaus,  Winfried       
Department of Language and Literature, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)
Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Kentner, G., Franz, I., Knoop, C. A., & Menninghaus, W. (2023). The final lengthening of pre-boundary syllables turns into final shortening as boundary strength levels increase. Journal of Phonetics, 97: 101225. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101225.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000E-7EF5-1
Abstract
Phrase-final syllable duration and pauses are generally considered to be positively correlated: The stronger the boundary, the longer the duration of phrase-final syllables, and the more likely or longer a pause. Exploring a large sample of complex literary prose texts read aloud, we examined pause likelihood and duration, pre-boundary syllable duration, and the pitch excursion at prosodic boundaries. Comparing these features across six predicted levels of boundary strength (level 0: no break; 1: simple phrase break; 2: short comma phrase break; 3: long comma phrase break; 4: sentence boundary; 5: direct speech boundary), we find that they are not correlated in a simple monotonic fashion. Whereas pause duration monotonically increases with boundary strength, both pre-boundary syllable duration and the pitch excursion on the pre-boundary syllable are largest for level-2 breaks and decrease significantly through levels 3 to 5. Our analysis suggests that pre-boundary syllable duration is partly contingent on the tonal realization, which is subject to f0 declination as the utterance progresses. We also surmise that pre-boundary syllable duration reflects differences in planning complexity for the different prosodic and syntactic boundaries. Overall, this study shows that a simple monotonic correlation between pause duration and pre-boundary syllable duration is not valid.