A note on the durations of fricatives in American English

The recent observations of Baum and Blumstein on the durations of word‐initial fricatives in citation form [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 82, 1073–1077 (1987)] are augmented with additional data on word‐initial and word‐final fricatives in connected speech. In general, these data support their findings that voiceless fricatives are longer than voiced fricatives and that the distributions of the two classes overlap considerably. The distinction is more pronounced if the fricatives are first separated on the basis of their position in a word, whether word‐final tokens are prepausal, and stress characteristic. The data suggest also that fricatives in connected speech are shorter than those in citation form.