Influences of Contextual Predictability and Lexical Prosody on Estonian Word Duration

The article investigates how different factors such as word predictability and part of speech may affect word duration in Estonian speech. The material comes from corpora of read texts. On the example of the five most frequent words in the material (eesti 'Estonian', ei 'not', ja 'and', on 'is; are', see 'it; this') the correlation of the predictability and duration of words is studied. It is concluded that more frequent collocations are pronounced shorter, while the left collocate tends to be slightly more important for the node word duration than the right one. The modelling of speech temporal structure requires a specification of parts of speech as, depending on the part of speech, different factors (frequency, collocational strength etc.) have a different influence on the node word duration.