Two Diagnostic Tests for Vowel Duration Models

Duration of photonic segments, such as vowels, are affected by many prosodic factors, including speaking rate, stress, location-in-utterance, and phonetic context. The problem of describing segmental duration can thus be described as that of finding a mapping from a large cross-product of discrete sets into the reals. The mathematical structure of this mapping is currently unknown. Besides the inherent difficulty of the problem, other causes for this state of affairs are the focusing of much research on the effects of single factors, and, when multiple factors are analyzed, the use of unnecessarily specific models and sub-optimal testing techniques.