Abstract:

Six talkers of Australian English read 108 dialogues that induced accented or unaccented renderings of target bisyllabic words in which the rhythmically strong initial syllable contained a tense or lax high vowel flanked by bilabial, alveolar, or velar consonants. The movement of the tongue dorsum and jaw were tracked in horizontal and vertical dimensions using an electromagnetometer system, and synchronized recordings were made of the acoustic signal. The duration of the target words was usually greater in accented position in the dialogue. However, for most of the talkers the effect was confined to the initial consonant. For many talkers, the accented vowel was acoustically more peripheral and was produced with a greater fronting of the tongue dorsum, with differences in fronting extending from the vowel's acoustic onset to its target. However, the magnitude of the effect of accent on supralaryngeal displacement was, in general, considerably less than the influence exerted by the consonantal context and there was no evidence that accent diminishes segmental coarticulatory influences. These results suggest that supralaryngeal cues to the accentuation of a vowel are strictly relational in the sense that they require a decoding of the segmental context in which they occur.