Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English

Peterson, Gordon E.; Lehiste, Ilse

doi:10.1121/1.1908183

Cited by 921 publications

(573 citation statements)

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“…Hence, segment durations cannot be manipulated validly in artificially time-compressed speech. A more fundamental reason for imitating only nonlinearities at the syllable level is that the major changes in temporal pattern are expected to occur mainly at higher levels: the amount of time compression in natural speech was found to depend strongly on the level of stress or on the status of the word (Peterson and Lehiste, 1960;Port, 1981;Janse et al, 2003). These effects are necessarily larger than phonemic or subphonemic effects.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…When speech rate is increased, durations of unstressed syllables in polysyllabic words are reduced more than those of stressed syllables, relatively, which makes the prosodic pattern more prominent (Janse et al, 2003). Furthermore, at sentence level, durations of sentencestressed syllables are reduced less, relatively speaking, than durations of unstressed syllables (Peterson and Lehiste, 1960;Port, 1981). The question is whether this enhanced prosodic pattern at word and sentence level in faster speech is the result of a strategic and communicative principle, namely that speakers tend to preserve the parts of information in the speech stream that are most informative.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

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Word perception in fast speech: artificially time-compressed vs. naturally produced fast speech

Janse

2004

Speech Communication

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Natural fast speech differs from normal-rate speech with respect to its temporal pattern. Previous results showed that word intelligibility of heavily artificially time-compressed speech could not be improved by making its temporal pattern more similar to that of natural fast speech. This might have been due to the extrapolation of timing rules for natural fast speech to rates that are much faster than can be attained by human speakers. The present study investigates whether, at a speech rate that human speakers can attain, artificially time-compressed speech is easier to process if its timing pattern is similar to that of naturally produced fast speech. Our first experiment suggests, however, that word processing speed was slowed down, relative to linear compression. In a second experiment, word processing of artificially time-compressed speech was compared with processing of naturally produced fast speech. Even when naturally produced fast speech is perfectly intelligible, its less careful articulation, combined with the changed timing pattern, slows down processing, relative to linearly time-compressed speech. Furthermore, listeners preferred artificially time-compressed speech over naturally produced fast speech. These results suggest that linearly time-compressed speech has both a temporal and a segmental advantage over natural fast speech.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Word perception in fast speech: artificially time-compressed vs. naturally produced fast speech

Janse

2004

Speech Communication

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“…Visual inspection of this array suggested that reaction time increased monotonically with vowel duration. Peterson and Lehiste (1960) isolated, analyzed, and measured the intrinsic durations of all English vowel nuclei when produced in CVC syllables. A Pearson productmoment correlation between the mean vowel RTs from the present experiment and the vowel durations reported by Peterson and Lehiste (1960) revealed a significant relationship between the two measures, r = .627, p < .05, such that RTs increased as vowel duration increased.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In particular, the structure of the syllable, especially its vowel duration, can predict RTs to its initial segment. Recall that the correlation between RTs and duration of vowels as measured by Peterson and Lehiste (1960) was 0.627, a substantial correlation considering the fact that we are dealing here with different tokens of different types spoken by a different speaker.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cracking the dual code: toward a unitary model of phoneme identification

Foss

Gernsbacher

1983

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

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The results of five experiments on the nature of the speech code and on the role of sentence context on speech processing are reported. The first three studies test predictions from the dual code model of phoneme identification (Foss, D. J., & Blank, M. A. Cognitive Psychology, 1980, 12, 1-31). According to that model, subjects in a phoneme monitoring experiment respond to a prelexical code when engaged in a relatively easy task, and to a postlexical code when the task is difficult. The experiments controlled ease of processing either by giving subjects multiple targets for which to monitor or by preceding the target with a similar-sounding phoneme that draws false alarms. The predictions from the model were not sustained. Furthermore, evidence for a paradoxical nonword superiority effect was observed. In Experiment IV reaction times (RTs) to all possible /d/-initial CVCs were gathered. RTs were unaffected by the target item's status as a word or nonword. but they were affected by the internal phonetic structure of the target-bearing item. Vowel duration correlated highly (0.627) with RTs. Experiment V examined previous work purporting to demonstrate that semantic predictability affects how the speech code is processed, in particular that semantic predictability leads to responses based upon a postlexical code. That study found "predictability" effects when words occurred in isolation; further, it found that vowel duration and other phonetic factors can account parsimoniously for the existing results. These factors also account for the apparent nonword superiority effects observed earlier. Implications of the present work for theoretical models that stress the interaction between semantic context and speech processing are discussed, as are implications for use of the phoneme monitoring task.When listeners process spoken language they develop a series of representations of the input which range in content from the low level physical structure of the speech signal to a high level semantic representation. A theory of comprehension must specify the nature of those representations or codes, and must detail the mechanisms by which they are developed. Here we will be concerned with two subproblems in the general area of speech perception. One question that we will address, one that has received considerable attention, is whether the listener computes a representation of the input whose units are relatively low level phonetic segments. Our second question is whether and to what extent the processing of low level codes is affected by the ongoing syntactic and semantic analyses of the input, that is, whether the codes truly interact in some way.

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“…When people speak faster, consonant durations are reduced less, relatively, than vowel durations (Lehiste, 1970;Gay, 1978;Max and Caruso, 1997). Furthermore, durations of sentence-stressed syllables are reduced less, relatively speaking, than durations of unstressed syllables (Peterson and Lehiste, 1960;Port, 1981). As a result, the relative difference in duration between stressed and unstressed syllables (i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

Word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech: prosodic and segmental factors

Janse

Nooteboom

Quené

2003

Speech Communication

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In this study we investigate whether speakers, in line with the predictions of the Hyper-and Hypospeech theory, speed up most during the least informative parts and less during the more informative parts, when they are asked to speak faster. We expected listeners to benefit from these changes in timing, and our main goal was to find out whether making the temporal organisation of artificially time-compressed speech more like that of natural fast speech would improve intelligibility over linear time compression. Our production study showed that speakers reduce unstressed syllables more than stressed syllables, thereby making the prosodic pattern more pronounced. We extrapolated fast speech timing to even faster rates because we expected that the more salient prosodic pattern could be exploited in difficult listening situations. However, at very fast speech rates, applying fast speech timing worsens intelligibility. We argue that the non-uniform way of speeding up may not be due to an underlying communicative principle, but may result from speakersÕ inability to speed up otherwise. As both prosodic and segmental information contribute to word recognition, we conclude that extrapolating fast speech timing to extremely fast rates distorts this balance between prosodic and segmental information.

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Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English

Cited by 921 publications

References 0 publications

Word perception in fast speech: artificially time-compressed vs. naturally produced fast speech

Word perception in fast speech: artificially time-compressed vs. naturally produced fast speech

Cracking the dual code: toward a unitary model of phoneme identification

Word-level intelligibility of time-compressed speech: prosodic and segmental factors

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