Effect of Prosody on Vowel-to-vowel Coarticulation in English

It has been claimed that segments are 'strongly' articulated in two prosodic positions: pitch-accented syllables [4, 5] and domaininitial positions [3, 6, 7, 9]. The current study examines the effect of these two prosodic conditions on resistance to vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, based on acoustic data. This study first shows that vowels are strongly articulated at the edges of prosodic domains. The degree of V-to-V coarticulation is in general greater when vowels are separated by a lower prosodic boundary (e.g., a word boundary), and it smaller when they are separated by a higher prosodic boundary (e.g., an Intonational Phrase boundary). A greater V-to-V coarticulation was found when the vowels have no pitch accent. Overall, vowels in prosodically stronger positions resist coarticulation.