Intrinsic Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English

Abstract

The study deals with the influence of preceding and following consonants on the duration of vowels and diphthongs of American English that may occur in stressed position within a sentence. A set of 1263 CNC words, pronounced in an identical frame by the same speaker, has been analyzed spectrographically, and the influence of various classes of consonants on the duration of the preceding nucleus has been determined. The residual durational differences are analyzed as intrinsic durational characteristics, associated with each syllable nucleus. The theory is tested with a set of 30 minimal pairs of CNC words, uttered by five different speakers.