F. Bell-Berti
Dept. Speech, Commun. Sci., and Theatre, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY 11439
Haskins Labs., New Haven, CT 06511
R. Zaremba
St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY 11439
Compensatory shortening has been reported to occur with increased utterance complexity; for example, durations of segments decrease as the number of syllables in a phrase increases. But compensatory shortening is not always found, and it has been suggested that its occurrence is related to differences in the nature of the speech tasks required of a speaker, for example, producing citation-form speech and oral reading [T. H. Crystal and A. S. House, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 88, 101--112 (1990)], and may also vary with the language studied. The origin of this timing pattern (or its absence) is of particular interest in understanding speech production, as a reflection of planning unit size; if its presence varies with speech task, so must the planning unit. This paper reports results of a study of several speech tasks (list reading, repeating a recorded exemplar, paragraph reading) on the extent of compensatory shortening. [Work supported by St. John's University and NIH DC-00121 to Haskins Laboratories.]