Duration compensation in non-adjacent consonant and temporal regularity

This study reports a case of consonant-induced duration compensation within a higher phonological unit in Korean. The main finding of this study is that longer duration in a consonant is partly compensated by shorter duration even in non-adjacent consonants. Results of experiments revealed that the shortening in non-adjacent consonants is a subsidiary compensation process to maintain constant duration at the larger domain than the syllable. Based on these observations, an attempt at modeling speech timing is presented with the perspective that speech production system is a process having multiple simultaneous tasks and the optimal output is obtained by a compromise between their objectives.