Schepman, A., Lickley, R., & Ladd, D. R. (2006). Effects of vowel length and “right context” on the alignment of Dutch nuclear accents. Journal of Phonetics, 34, 1–28.
Presentation: Sally
Summary: Hsiao-chien
The authors studied F0 peak alignment of rising and falling nuclear accents in declarative sentences in Standard Dutch. There are three major issues to be addressed: (1) The size of right-context effect and the boundary between structurally conditioning and physical constraints; (2) Whether vowel length is determined by syllable structure using a test of adding a suffix or a prefix; (3) The comparison between nuclear and prenuclear accents. Six participants were recruited, three female and three male, and they were asked to read 120 sentences aloud. Results showed that there were some main effects in the alignment of H tones. For vowel length, the alignment for long vowels was earlier than that for short vowels. The H tone aligned later when the prefix was present. In short vowels, H tones were aligned slightly earlier before the end of the vowel when there was a suffix. It was reversed in long vowels. In the alignment of L tones, short vowels were aligned earlier than long vowels even though the effect was small. In addition, the authors measured the durations of segments. They found that the vowel duration and the onset consonant duration were longer when vowels were phonologically long. Consonant segments were shorter when a suffix was present. This was called “polysyllabic shortening”, also found in short vowels. Postvocalic consonants were also shorter when a prefix was present. However, the authors considered that the effects were extremely small, and some expected interactions was not found. They believed that Dutch does not have stress clash effects on alignment.
