Durational correlates of English sublexical constituent structure

This study investigates whether differences (a) in word-internal morphological structure and (b) in lexical stress patterns are reflected in prosodic constituent structure, by examining duration measurements in Scottish English. In Experiments 1 and 2, at a slow speech rate, stem-final rhymes followed by Level II suffixes were on average 4–6% longer than corresponding strings in monomorphemic words, and 7–8% longer than stem-final rhymes followed by Level I suffixes. These results are consistent with the view that stems preceding Level II suffixes are mapped onto prosodic words in the prosodic representation. Experiment 3 obtained no reliable durational differences, even at a slow speech rate, between the initial syllable rhymes of SS words and SW words, which does not provide evidence for the hypothesis that these different stress patterns are represented as differences in foot structure.