Speech rate and vowel duration in American English

Abstract

In an experiment designed to elucidate the manner in which vowel duration in American English is altered by speaking rate and how rate interacts with other duration-affecting factors, vowel durations were measured in nonsense words spoken in frame sentences. The following inherent and contextual factors were manipulated: vowel height and tenseness (/ɪ, I, e, r/); post-vocalic consonant voicing; vowel position in utterance (words were monosyllabic or disyllabic with the target vowel in the initial syllable); and speaking rate. Preliminary results confirm earlier findings that vowel height has an additive effect on vowel duration and consonant voicing interacts with vowel class (tense versus lax) and position. The results further show that rate exhibits similar behavior to voicing. It interacts with vowel class and voicing, and with position in voiced consonants.