Effects of Rhythmic Stress on Unstressed Syllables

Patterns of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables are common in many languages. This binary pattern is often interrupted on a perceptual level by consecutive unstressed syllables. Consecutive unstressed syllables are especially common in English at the ends of nouns and in the middle of words with five or more syllables. This project investigates whether such phonologically unstressed syllables increase in duration at the production level when their location in a word makes them eligible for prominence. Subjects were recorded reading English nouns and long English words with and without stress lapses. The durations of syllables after lapses were compared to the durations of syllables after stressed syllables. A method for comparing words with differing numbers of syllables was also devised and tested