INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

The Duration Compensation Issue Revisited

Plínio A. Barbosa

Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil

This work presents a reanalysis of the duration compensation issue at the VC level, for which vowel duration is lengthened when replacing a following (long) voiceless consonant with a (short) voiced consonant. Analyses of fifteen Brazilian Portuguese words and pseudo-words reveal that (1) duration compensation is not restricted to consonants differing in voicing only, (2) duration compensation seems to be restricted to narrow-focussed words, and (3) duration compensation applies to the first following consonant only in VCC sequences. These results suggest that duration compensation could be a mechanism to learn how to plan the sequence of vowel onset positions at early stages of language acquisition.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Barbosa, Plínio A. (2013): "The duration compensation issue revisited", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 3027-3031.