Function word reduction: The role of adjacent stress

Monosyllabic function words in speech are often reduced from their full citation forms. Researchers have shown that reduction is influenced by part of speech, predictability, prosody, and disfluency. This work isolates the role of an additional factor, preceding stress, in function word reduction by analyzing the realization of ‘‘for’’ in a highly controlled corpus. Five American English speakers read pairs of disyllabic words with initial or final stress (BOOty, bouTIQUE) in the frame ‘‘Please say [word] for me.’’ Two speakers show striking sensitivity to preceding stress, always producing strong–weak alternations, such that strong ‘‘for’’ follows a weak syllable and vice versa. The rimes in the strong versions average 90 ms while the weak are just 50 ms. The strong rimes consist of a clearly segmentable vowel plus /r/. In the weak, however, /r/ is not distinguishable in the acoustics as its own segment; rather, it influences the vowel F3 value. The other three speakers always realize ‘‘for’’ as weak, with an average duration of 39 ms after either stressed or unstressed syllables. Though limited, these results suggest that some speakers construct rhythmic groupings in speech production. Further work will determine whether similar effects are found in spontaneous speech.