Interaction of Speaking Rate and Postvocalic Consonantal Voicing on Vowel Duration in American English

In American English, a vowel preceding a voiced consonant has frequently been shown to be of longer duration than one preceding a voiceless consonant. However, Port [R.F. Port, J. Acoust. Soc. Am.69, 262-274 (1981)] reported no effect of postvocalic consonant voicing on the total duration of the VC unit. Port attributed this finding to an inverse relationship between vowel and consonant durations. Our study replicates and extends this work to the entire CVC syllabic unit across changes in speaking rate. Syllable and segmental durations were measured for /pVC/ target syllables. The target syllables used eight vowels and voiced or voiceless cognates of the final consonant, which was either stop or fricative. Syllables were produced in sentence contexts as three speaking rates by four female and four male native American English speakers.