ASA 124th Meeting New Orleans 1992 October

4pSP2. The relation between compensatory shortening and speech task.

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.]