In this paper we describe an experiment which was set up to investigate the phenomenon of final lengthening in Russian, to measure the degree of preboundary lengthening and find out factors which influence its degree in Russian. The fact that word duration depends on its position within the phrase has been known for a long time. The tendency for words to lengthen in the vicinity of phrase boundaries has been reported by many researchers. It has been found that the syllable duration before a pause may increase by 60-200 msec. This effect, known as prepausal (also: pre-boundary, final) lengthening, has been well studied for a number of languages. comparable data were found for English, French and Swedish. According to Klatt, final lengthening in English takes place in the end of the phrase or intonation unit even if there is no physical pause in the acoustic signal. In such a case, it is the lengthening of the final syllable that helps the listener perceive the phrase or intonation unit boundary. "The syllable or syllables are longer in the end of the sentence than in any other place within the sentence. A word in isolation is as long as a word in the end of the sentence and two times longer than in the beginning of the sentence". Although the issue has been studied by many researchers, mainly for the purposes of the development of a temporal model for speech synthesis, it is not yet clear which segment is being lengthened, whether it is just the last vowel or the last stressed vowel, the stressed syllable only or the post-stress part of the word as well. The data reported by the researchers vary.
Cite as: Volskaya, N., Stepanova, S. (2004) On the temporal component of intonational phrasing. Proc. 9th Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2004), 641-644
@inproceedings{volskaya04_specom,
author={N. Volskaya and S. Stepanova},
title={{On the temporal component of intonational phrasing}},
year=2004,
booktitle={Proc. 9th Conference on Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2004)},
pages={641--644}
}