Modeling of durational patterns in reiterant speech

Abstract

In a paper presented at the 1976 ASA fall meeting, Liberman and Streeter [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 60, S27 (A) (1976)] in which a nonsense syllable is substituted for each of the original syllables of a target phrase) shows stable durational patterns, influenced by the stress and constituent structure of the target phrase, and relatively unaffected by its segmental makeup. In the present paper, a model of durational patterns in reiterant speech is described, and used to argue that English stress patterns maintain their phonetic reality even when they are not differentiated by pitch.