A Preliminary Study of Temporal Adaptation in Polish VC Groups

The study presents experimental data on Polish vowel durations in consonantal contexts gathered to test prosodic hypotheses. An attempt is made to verify the significance of the process of balancing V-to-V durations in a dynamical model of speech rhythm applied to Polish. We report on the results of a controlled experiment followed by a query of a corpus of running Polish speech, both investigating the influence of selected Polish consonants on preceding vowel duration. The voicing effect, i.e. the lengthening of a vowel preceding a voiced consonant, is a very well documented phenomenon in many languages [4] especially in the Germanic family [18, 19, 21]. The adaptation of duration between vowels an