This study deals with the influence of preceding and following consonants on the duration of stressed vowels and diphthongs in American English. A set of 1263 CNC words, pronounced in an identical frame by the same speaker, was analyzed spectrographically, and the influences of various classes of consonants on the duration of the nucleus were determined. The residual durational differences are analyzed as intrinsic durational characteristics, associated with each syllable nucleus. The theory is tested with a set of 30 minimal pairs of CNC words, uttered by five different speakers.

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This paper is concerned with the effect of morphological and syntactic boundaries on the temporal structure of spoken utterances. Two speakers produced 20 tokens each of four sets of words consisting of a mono-syllabic base form, disyllabic and trisyllabic words derived from the base by the addition of suffixes, and three short sentences in which the base form was followed by a syntactic boundary; this in turn was followed by a stressed syllable, one unstressed syllable, and two unstressed syllables. The sentences thus reproduced the syllabic sequences of the derived words. The duration of words and segments was measured from oscillograms. The manifestation of morphological and syntactic boundaries is discussed, and some implications of the findings relative to the temporal programming of spoken utterances are considered.

It has been frequently claimed that the meaning of syntactically ambiguous sentences (such as “Visiting relatives can be a nuisance”) can be made explicit by phonetic means such as stress and intonation. This study describes some ways in which such disambiguation can be accomplished. Fifteen ambiguous sentences were first read by four speakers. The ambiguities were then pointed out, and each speaker stated which meaning he had intended to produce. Each sentence was then produced again twice, the speaker making a conscious effort to differentiate between the two potential meanings. Thirty listeners tried to identify the meaning which the speakers had intended. In 10 out of 15 cases, listeners performed at better than chance level, which implies that the intention of the speakers was successfully communicated to the listeners. The suprasegmental patterns employed by the speakers in successful disambiguation were established by acoustic analysis. While stress and intonation play a part, timing seems to have been the principal means by which the two meanings of the sentence were differentiated.

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