Segmental and Temporal Aspects of Utterance-Final Lengthening

Abstract Two experiments were conducted to examine the manner in which utterance-final lengthening is exhibited by the durations of words containing various fricatives and vowels in different phonetic environments. In experiment 1, utterance-final lengthening was measured for words containing the fricatives /f/, /v/, /s/, and /z/ in word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions in both phrase-final and utterance-final locations. The results showed small amounts of utterance-final lengthening for words containing fricatives in word-initial and word-medial positions, with much greater elongation when fricatives appeared in word-final position. In experiment 2, utterance-final lengthening was measured for words containing a word-medial long versus short vowel followed by a word-final voiced versus voiceless stop consonant. The results showed a greater amount of utterance-final lengthening for words containing a terminal voiced versus voiceless stop. The findings are discussed in terms of constraints on the speaker’s programming of segment durations in sentence contexts.