Effects of phonetic contexts on the duration of phonetic segments in fluent read speech

Coarticulation is an important phenomenon that affects the realization of phonetic segments in fluent speech. The effects of coarticulation are prominent in both spectral and temporal domains. Various effects of phonetic contexts on the duration of the adjacent phonetic segments have been previously reported based on individual distinctive features (e.g., voiced stops lengthen and unvoiced stops shorten the preceding vowels) or specific contexts (e.g., both /s/ and /p/ are shorter in a /sp/ cluster). This paper presents a comprehensive method for analyzing the phonetic context effects of all phonetic segments on the duration of their preceding or succeeding adjacent phonetic segments in fluent read speech, using the TIMIT American English corpus. Statistical methods are employed to analyze the variations in mean durations of all phonetic segments as a function of preceding or succeeding phonetic identity. Confidence intervals of 99% for the mean durations are also presented to reveal which pairs of phonetic contexts present statistically significant differences.

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