Sound durations in Italian vowel sequences
Pier Luigi Salza · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1985
The duration of Italian vowels in monosyllabic and bisyllabic sequences was investigated. The corpus consisted of about 120 PVPAPA nonsense samples, uttered five times in frame sentences by a professional speaker. The test syllable was always the first, containing vowel sequences actually produced in the Italian lexicon. The duration data were taken on digital spectrograms by applying broadly accepted rules for sound boundary identification [G. Peterson and I. Lehiste, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 32, 693–703 (1960)]. The resulting durational patterns seem to be correlated with both the vowel type and the sound position in the sequence. The shortest values have been measured for asyllabic vowels in diphthongs, in first and in second position as well. Stress and syllable-per-word factors were also analyzed by employing specific control lists. The overall results were compared with earlier acoustical data on single vowels [F. Ferrero et al., J. Ital. Linguist. 3, 87–96 (1978)]. These results will be particularly useful in the generation of prosodic rules for text-to-speech synthesis.