It is well known that the greater the number of unstressed syllables following a stressed syllable within a word, the shorter is the stressed syllable itself: for example, "stick" is shorter in "sticky" than in "stick" alone, and may be shorter still in "stickiness". This apparent tendency for the number of syllables in a word to inversely affect the duration of a member syllable may be termed "polysyllabic shortening".It is not clear from previous research, however, if it is indeed the size of the word itself, or the size of some other constituent, which actually predicts the stressed syllable's magnitude. This research is intended to ascertain if a constituent can be identified which best predicts the operation of this kind of durational effect.
This is done by measuring the duration of stressed syllables in different prosodic constituents, each composed of either one or two syllables. If we find that the stressed syllable is shorter in the two syllable constituent, this may be regarded as evidence that the effect operates over a prosodic domain delimited by that constituent's boundaries.
Candidate constituents consistent with previous findings include the within-word foot (which begins with a stressed syllable and may include subsequent unstressed syllables up to a word boundary and/or the next stressed syllable), the word itself or some other within-word unit, and a cross-word foot delimited by lexically stressed syllables. The results indicate that, of these, it is the number of syllables in the word itself which best predicts stressed syllable duration.
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