Polysyllabic shortening and word-final lengthening in English

We investigate Polysyllabic shortening effects in three prosodic domains, the word, the inter-stress interval (ISI) and the narrow rhythm unit (NRU), in a large corpus of English broadcast speech. Results confirm and extend earlier findings, indicating that these effects are interpretable as artifacts of word-final lengthening. We do, however, find effects compatible with the assumption of eurhythmic principles in speech production.

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