The effect of accent on the acoustic cues to stop voicing in Radio News speech
Data from three acoustic cues to stop voicing is analyzed for the effect of phrasal accent in a corpus of read radio news speech from a single speaker of American English. The results show that VOT, Closure Duration and F0 are significant cues to voicing for stops in this corpus, though the acoustic patterns vary by place of articulation. There is a significant effect of phrasal accent on each cue, with increased values for both voiced and voiceless stops, described here as a pattern of syntagmatic strengthening. Patterns of paradigmatic strengthening, with enhanced voicing contrast under accent, are observed only in sporadic cases. The results indicate that accent effects in radio news speech are similar to those reported for “laboratory speech” from prior phonetics studies.