Sentence-final lengthening in connected text
Caroline L. Smith, Lisa A. Hogan · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2001
Lengthening at the end of a prosodic domain is a robust pattern in English, with larger domains characterized by greater amounts of lengthening. Here we investigate whether this pattern extends above the sentence. Is there more sentence-final lengthening at the end of a paragraph than at the end of a paragraph-internal sentence? Ten recordings were made at weekly intervals of an American English speaker reading extracts from a computer manual, which was chosen because such writing has well-defined topic structure. At the same recording sessions, the speaker also read isolated sentences which were constructed so that each word that was sentence final in the connected text occurred sentence medially in one of the sentences, which were designed to match the presence or absence of a pitch accent on the word in the text. Sentence-final lengthening in the text was gauged by comparing a word’s duration in the text to its mean duration across the ten repetitions of the isolated sentences. Very preliminary results suggest that there is more lengthening at the end of a paragraph than in the middle of a paragraph; headings may behave like part of the following paragraph. [Work supported by NSF.]