Ludger Paschen (ZAS Berlin)
Temporal aspects of speech such as the duration of vowels and consonants provides a window into the cognitive system underlying human language. A major question concerns the universality of temporal aspects, given that speech production is tightly linked to the biological and physical capacities of humans. The actual durational properties of phones is the result of a complex interplay between biological characteristics, melodic and prosodic features, linguistic context, speaker-dependent variables, among others.
This talk will provide an overview of temporal patterns in a cross-linguistic sample using data from DoReCo, a corpus containing time-aligned speech data from 51 languages. Special attention will be given to the duration of segments at the edge of prosodic boundaries, in particular final lengthening. The motivation for focussing on final lengthening is that while this process is commonly considered to be a universal feature of spoken language, languages are known to place very specific constraints on the extent of variation of segmental duration , most notably when a language maintains a phonological length contrast, or has phonotactic restrictions on the distribution of long segments. A recent study reveals several significant interactions between phonological length and final lengthening, suggesting that final lengthening is contingent on the phonology of individual languages.