Effects of prosodic structure on consonant weakening

While the effects of lexical stress are most obvious on vowels, consonants also show evidence of prosodic structure. In English, stress conditions the flapping of alveolar stops and Turk [‘‘Effects of Position in Syllable and Stress on Consonant Articulation,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1993] has shown that labial stops also shorten in the flapping environment. This study investigates the strength of intervocalic consonants as a function of word stress, position‐in‐word, and speech rate. Two stress pairs of closely matched disyllabic words (one for word‐initial, one for word‐medial) were recorded for 16 English consonants at three rates of speech. Words for [v] are as follows, with the stressed syllable capitalized: VENdor, veNEER; SEver, seVERE. Results for fricatives will be reported, including the following tendencies for fricatives which are the onset to an unstressed syllable: voiced fricatives are more fully voiced, some fricatives are shorter, more formant structure is evident in the noise, and transitions to the following vowel may be longer. Findings for each speech rate will be compared to determine how the rate may impact consonant behavior. Each correlate will be evaluated with respect the hypothesis that consonants in unstressed syllables are more vowellike.