Word frequency, stress and co articulation in English

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

  This paper reports ultrasound and acoustic experiments to see whether the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in English is highly conditioned by word frequency and stress. First, both articulatory and acoustic experiments showed that V1s such as low or mid vowels in V1CV2(/i, I/) sequences were articulated further front and higher in high-frequency words than in low frequency words, given the anticipatory coarticulation from V2s (i.e. high and front vowels) to V1s. This result provides evidence that word frequency directly affects the low-level phonetic-fine details such as coarticulation. Secondly, the experiments showed that secondary stressed vowels, i.e. V1s in V1CV2 sequences were articulated higher than primary stressed vowels as a result of a stronger anticipatory coarticulation from the following unstressed vowels. This result indicates that secondary stressed vowels are less resistant to vowel-to-vowel coarticulation than primary stressed vowels. Further, it implies that even stressed vowels are influenced by stressed vowels subphonemically.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• 1. Introduction
  2. Word Frequency and the Degree of V-to-V Coarticulation
  3. Stress Effects on Resistance to Coarticulation
  4. Discussion
  5. Conclusion
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