Rhythmic constraints in durational control

Two potential factors in durational control are addressed. First, we investigate whether lengthening a syllable implies lengthening all of its constituent phonemes in a regular way. Analysis of a small corpus of syllables shows that this is not the case. Second, we investigate the influence of rhythm by inspecting the pattern of compression of unstressed or unaccented syllables as a function of the number and position of syllables in the stress or accent group. We find no evidence of compression. We conclude that speakers do not control the timing of phonemes within a syllable very precisely, and that speakers do not compress or stretch unstressed syllables to produce more rhythmic speech