Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles: Reduction and Elaboration in Speech Communication Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain September 30 - October 2, 1991

Categoricality in Acceptability Judgements for Strong Versus Weak Vowels

Anne Cutler (1), Beverley Fear (2)

(1) MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, UK
(2) Engineering Dept., Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

A distinction between strong and weak vowels can be drawn on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. An experiment was conducted in which sets of contextually matched word-intial vowels ranging from clearly strong to clearly weak were cross-spliced, and the naturalness of the resulting words was rated by listeners. The ratings showed that in general cross-spliced words were only significantly less acceptable than unspliced words when schwa was not involved; this supports a categorical distinction based on vowel quality.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cutler, Anne / Fear, Beverley (1991): "Categoricality in acceptability judgements for strong versus weak vowels", In PPoSpSt-1991, paper 018.