Abstract ▼ AI-Helper

The goal of this paper is to investigate effects of three prosodic factors, such as phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented), prosodic boundary (IP-initial vs. IP-medial) and coda voicing (e.g., bed vs. bet), on acoustic realization of English vowels (/i, $_I/$, $/{\varepsilon}$

The goal of this paper is to investigate effects of three prosodic factors, such as phrasal accent (accented vs. unaccented), prosodic boundary (IP-initial vs. IP-medial) and coda voicing (e.g., bed vs. bet), on acoustic realization of English vowels (/i, $_I/$, $/{\varepsilon}$, ${\ae}/$) as produced by native (Canadian) and nonnative (Korean) speakers. The speech corpus included 16 minimal pairs (e.g., bet-bat, bet-bed) embedded in a sentence. Results show that phonological contrast between vowels are maximized when they were accented, though the contrast maximization pattern was not the same between the English and Korean speakers. However, domain-initial position do not affect the phonetic manifestation of vowels. Results also show that phonological contrast due to coda voicing is maximized only when the vowels are accented. These results propose that the phonetic realization of vowels is affected by phrasal accent only, and not by the location within prosodic position.