Is the phonetic quality of unaccented words unpredictable? An example from spontaneous Finnish

In spontaneous speech, occurrences of the same word form vary phonetically. Words that do not receive sentence accent tend to be less clearly articulated and shorter in duration in comparison to prominent words. If such an unaccented word is isolated from continuous speech, it may not even be identi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Journal of the International Phonetic Association Vol. 31; no. 1; pp. 127 - 138
Main Authors:	Lennes, Mietta, Alarotu, Nina, Vainio, Martii
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01-06-2001 International Phonetic Association
Subjects:	Accentuation Acoustic phonetics Acoustics Consonants Continuous speech Conversation Descriptive studies and applied theories Finnish language Linguistics Orthographies Perception theory Phonetic analysis Phonetics Phonology Pronunciation Quality Speech Speech duration Spontaneous speech Syntactic structures Theory Transcription Velar consonants Vowels Words Acoustic phonetics Sentence stress Phonetic articulation Spoken language Word Quality Spontaneous speech Phonetic variation Unstressed
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Summary:	In spontaneous speech, occurrences of the same word form vary phonetically. Words that do not receive sentence accent tend to be less clearly articulated and shorter in duration in comparison to prominent words. If such an unaccented word is isolated from continuous speech, it may not even be identifiable by listeners, but as part of the speech stream, it is usually easily identified and helps the listener to perceive and organize the spoken message as a whole. Thus, the variability of unaccented words is not random but must follow certain patterns determined by context. In this study, we take a closer look at the Finnish unaccented word-like construction niinku in spontaneous conversational speech samples collected from one female Finnish speaker. We provide an analysis of the phonetic variability of the niinku structure found in the data, including such properties as segmental duration, segmental make-up, and phonetic quality. We then show what kind of properties are common to all occurrences of this unaccented construction and discuss the conditions that probably govern its acoustic-phonetic quality.
Bibliography:	ark:/67375/6GQ-F2Z102QM-Q PII:S0025100301001104 istex:A6FBC163C391583D26617382509BCDE8CACB364E ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-1 ObjectType-Feature-2
ISSN:	0025-1003 1475-3502
DOI:	10.1017/S0025100301001104