Bertil Lyberg Barbro Ekholm
Telia Res. AB, S-136 80 Haninge, Sweden
The segment duration varies depending on a number of linguistic and nonlinguistic factors. At the word and phrase levels, the segment duration is found to vary depending on the position in the work and in the phrase. The positional effects on segment duration have been studied by several investigators and, for some languages, models have been hypothesized in order to describe the duration of speech segments in different positions in words and phrases. The greatest positional effect is the phenomenon of final lengthening that appears to be of considerable generality as a phonetic phenomenon. Most computational models for segment duration are, however, static, i.e., the durational properties are modeled at a certain speech rate. In this investigation the segment duration is studied at different speech rate and with focus assignment systematically varied along the sentence. The segment duration values are studied by means of both reiteratant speech and ordinary read speech. A tentative dynamic model for the segment duration is presented.