Alexandra Garcia// 300343935

Abstract
An investigation of a segmental and a suprasegmental factor that could potentially
affect vowel length in English. Building on previous works that look at open and closed
syllable words to distinguish words themselves, as well as attempting to replicate
stress patterns that may or may not induce a greater vowel duration length through
phrase positioning. A simple experiment with 5 young adult female participants
speaking a passage aloud whilst recorded and vowel duration times were calculated
for 12 target words. Results proved a difference between open and closed syllable
words as well as the positioning in the phrase, as hypothesised. However, multiple
issues were encountered within the analysis of the data and flaws within the studyeven then, in the future these findings have implications for further research within
final consonant weakening affecting vowel duration in words, specific to New Zealand
English.
Introduction
This article investigates what has been said to affect vowel length in English. It seeks
to build on the work of Mark Lehman (1993), who looked at open and closed syllable
distinction as defined by the vowel duration, looking at its average and variability in
developmental speech production between children and adults. His results found that
children dont differentiate vowel duration to pre-empt a final consonants presence,
while also looking at adult-like phonetic behaviour and concluding in his study that
children developed certain kinds of ways of pronouncing vowels like adults at certain
ages, with vowel durations for open syllable words and voiced closed syllable words
shortening with age until a certain point. Overall it was successfully found that age
played a massive role in the duration of vowel length. This research contributed
greatly into developmental changes from childhood to adulthood. If it is something
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that becomes fully realised within childhood, in adulthood does vowel length remain
constant within interspeaker varieties? From here I looked at one variable he used in
particular, the usage of open and closed syllable words, and wondered if that alone
had an effect on vowel length in adult speech.
A study by D Kimbrough Oller (1971), looks directly at the effect of position during
speech on segment duration. The experiment asked participants to say multiple
phrases with words of varying stress patterns. The findings concluded firstly, that
final syllables were found to be longer than non final syllables. Secondly, word-initial
consonants were lengthened compared to medial consonants, and thirdly, final
syllable lengthening occurring in many places as well as in various different kinds of
syllables- not just consonants but vowels too. From this study I wondered, in a similar
line to the first study examined, whether vowel length was affected by the positioning
of a word in a phrase- if a word ended on an open syllable in a final phrase, for
example, would the length of the vowel itself increase greatly compared to an open
syllable word than was initial or medial in a phrase?
This present study combines the most interesting aspects that were not specifically
looked at to generally garner an overall effect on vowel length. Based on these past
results, this investigation seeks to provide evidence towards an open syllable word
affecting and increasing vowel length in English, and also the positioning of a word in
a phrase (initial, medial, and ending a phrase) can affect vowel length by increasing it.

Methodology and Procedure

This investigation tested for two main things that potentially affect vowel length:
firstly, the segmental factor of an open or closed syllable following a vowel, and
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secondly, a suprasegmental context of the position of the word in a phrase (initial,

medial, and ending). I constructed a passage with 6 variants of vowels with an open
and a closed syllable version of each- 12 words and 87 syllables in total. I placed an
equal amount of words in the beginning, middle, and end of a phrase within the
passage. I had 5 participants, all female speakers of New Zealand English, who grew
up in New Zealand, between the ages of 16-25. These participants were randomly
selected one day from Cuba Street that looked to fit my selection criteria in order to
minimise inter-speaker variation. After filling out the necessary forms, I gave each
participant the same passage and asked them to go over it until it was familiar, to
reduce unnecessary pauses. Once they were ready I asked them to read the passage
aloud at a comfortable pace, recording as they went. I recorded the passages on a
Samsung Galaxy S5.
Passage: It was getting late, and Id been in a lively mood. However the bar was
about to shut. I went to pay and stood in the queue. My feet were sore, even though I
was wearing my
someone started* a
dry - I could see a man
under a pile of people.
pulled out anything

Lexical
set
START//

Initial middle

End

Bar

Shar
p

PRICE /e/ fight

GOAT // throa
t
FLEECE
Feet
/i/
GOOSE
//
FACE /e/

*starte
d
dry
though

fight. My throat went

trying to break free
Thankfully, nobody
sharp.

free

pay

sneakers. But then,

mood
queu
e
Late

Alexandra Garcia// 300343935

*In Aylas case, started was substituted for sharp as the recording interfered with
the vowel quality.
Results
Open Syllables

Mean
Standard Error
Median
Mode
Standard
Deviation
Sample
Variance
Kurtosis
Skewness
Range
Minimum
Maximum
Sum
Count

0.19464
2
0.01150
3
0.18424
2
0.26126
2
0.06300
4
0.00397
0.93321
0.17233
1
0.22741
7
0.09448
5
0.32190
2
5.83925
4
30

Closed Syllables

Standard Error

0.15578
3
0.00846
3

Median

0.15744

Mode
Standard
Deviation
Sample
Variance

#N/A
0.04635
1
0.00214
8

Kurtosis

Maximum

-0.0433
0.14377
2
0.18787
1
0.07774
1
0.26561
2

Sum
Count

4.67349
30

Mean

Skewness
Range
Minimum

Just from a visual glance of these descriptive statistics, I can see a rough difference
between the means. Open syllables do have a slightly larger sample variation. This is
better shown through more visual data sets of a Histogram and a Box Plot graph.

Alexandra Garcia// 300343935

Normalised Vowel Duration Length (Overall Data)

18
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0

Frequency

Length (secs) [Bin]

Frequency

This histogram proves that the data roughly follows a normal distribution. There are
some larger values towards the end and at the beginning however it is visually
unimodal with a bell shaped curve and is more or less symmetrical. It proves this
vowel duration is continuous. There are 5 more values above this but do not look to be
significant outliers- rather extensions of the right tail end of the bell curve (where
there would obviously be less in the left tail end as it is bounded by 0).

Comparison of Vowel Duration between Open and Closed Syllables

0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
Open

Closed

The boxplots confirm an earlier prediction in data of a greater variance within open
syllables. Closed syllables have a significantly smaller median interquartile range
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however the means are quite close in location.

I used a t-test to further confirm whether the data distribution was significant.
t-Test: Paired Two Sample for Means

Mean
Variance
Observations
Pearson Correlation
Hypothesized Mean
Difference
Df
t Stat
P(T<=t) one-tail
t Critical one-tail
P(T<=t) two-tail
t Critical two-tail

Open
0.1946
42
0.0039
7
30
0.3292
08

Closed
0.1557
83
0.0021
48
30

0
29
3.2860
46
0.0013
3
1.6991
27
0.0026
61
2.0452
3

Position in Phrase
0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
initial

medial

ending

A paired t-test was used because participants provided data for both open and closed
syllables. With a probability value of 0.002661 this gives us a clearer indication of the
significance of the data- it is safe to assume there is a clear difference between
distributions as it is below 0.05 (t(29)= 3.286046, p=0.002661) As there is no
prediction about what direction the difference would be, I used the two tailed
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probability value. Therefore there is a clear significant difference in the duration of

vowels between closed and open syllables.

I tested for the suprasegmental context of the positioning in a phrase with a

hypothesis of whether initial, medial, and end position in a phrase affects vowel length
of a word. The box plot shows again visually a much greater sample variation between
the length of a vowel when the word is in the middle of a phrase and much less varied
data when it is towards the end. On a glance it appears to be that vowels in words
that are initial in a phrase tend to have a shorter duration than that of a vowel in the
middle or end of a phrase, however again to clarify and provide more solid evidence
for this, I tested through ANOVA instead of a t-test as it has more than one
independent variable.
Anova: Single Factor
SUMMARY
Group Cou
s
nt
Sum
initial
20
media
l
21
endin
g
19
ANOVA
Source of
Variation

3.845162

Averag
e
0.14875
6
0.18310
3

3.692453

0.19434

2.975129

SS

df

Variance
0.001638
0.005182
0.002392

MS

P-value

F crit
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Between
Groups
Within
Groups

0.02225
7
0.17781
5

0.01112 3.56732
2
8
6
57 0.00312

Total

0.20007
2

59

0.03469
7

3.15884
3

With a probability value of 0.034697 it is also likely that there is a difference in vowel
length when it comes to the positioning of the particular word in a phrase as it is less
than 0.05.
Using ANOVA, I am under the assumption that the underlying populations are normal
and that the populations have equal variances. However due to earlier mistakes I
have incorrectly set up my variables from the beginning and therefore was unable to
use a t-test to provide evidence towards my hypothesis. ANOVA allows me to continue
with my current data and hypothesis with the little understanding I have of it and in
the future I would improve on setting up my data correctly for the investigation from
the beginning to avoid these mistakes.
Discussion

Alexandra Garcia// 300343935

In terms of the hypothesis and the results, it is unsurprising to my own prediction.

However, there were definitely some factors in my study that I did not account forfirstly, the New Zealand accent and its effect on closed syllable words. Often I would
struggle when a vowel would end and the consonant would technically begin, but in
some samples- such as Ayla- the vowel simply ended and I could only assume that
something else went on in our brains to finish the word off itself.

1: /late/ phonetically segmented from Ayla. The /t/ phoneme is essentially nonexistent with no sign of a plosive- just a trailing off from the previous vowel dipthong.
In this example of late in particular (and in almost all the forms of the word I
recorded) it is almost an open syllable word instead of the intended closed syllable
word. This completely disregards some of the data Ive collected in terms of one of my
variables being disregarded, and how the words are intended to be pronounced are
not pronounced as such in this particular variety of English. That being said though, it
does not seem to show up so much in the data- open syllables still hold to have a
significant difference in mean compared to closed syllables, but this weakening or
complete elision of the final consonant could account for the whisker ends of the box
plot that lie quite a ways away from the median interquartile range. A study done by
Luigi Borzio (1993) mentions in one part about what affects vowel length in English to
a very broad detail. Borzio mentions that some alternations in vowel length can be
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considered systematic or not at all, using the example of blaspheme and

blasphemous where the median /e/ vowel loses its stress in the word with the
addition of a suffix. However when you take a word like desire and desirous,
though the /i/ vowel is in the same consonant based phonetic environment, it does not
lose stress in the word. A model similar to this could be used in the future for closed
syllable words to reduce the likelihood of final consonant elision.
I also discovered I had incorrectly structured the paragraph towards the needs for my
hypothesis, therefore causing major issues when it came to testing the
suprasegmental context and its effect on vowel duration. I did not account for enough
closed and open syllable variations within each initial, medial, and ending of a phrase.
This lead me to change how I would have originally tested my data and for future
studies it would do to properly ensure that the variables being investigated managed
to cover all aspects of the hypothesis question.
I found participant selection worked very well in favour of the investigation. All had
relatively similar backgrounds as speakers were all female and grew up in New
Zealand, between ages 16-25. Some variations include Alaina who has a father from
Australia and Sam who has a mother with ancestry from Samoa. Natalies parents are
British and she herself was born there, however she has spent most of her life in New
Zealand and has a strong kiwi accent. None of these factors made any significant
impact towards the data in terms of extreme outliers.
Should I have correctly arranged my passage, I would have been able to relate my
findings to that of Ollers (1971) study. In the future to get more detail and directly
build off Ollers findings, the same amount of closed and open syllable words would
have been placed initially, medially, and at the ends of each phrase to be able to get
the correct data.
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This also confirms Lehmans (1993) research that vowel duration does have a
distinction with the way it changes its length open and closed syllables respectively,
however in particular with this study, with young women of the New Zealand English
variety. Given the segmental and suprasegmental effects on vowel duration that Ive
found thus far, segment duration appears to be significant in word recognition in a
similar way to Lehmans research, in that New Zealand English it seems a closed
syllable word turned into an open syllable word due to the lack of full realisation of the
final consonant is recognised as the closed syllable word it should be, even though
were not saying it right. It would pay to further test this against a true open syllable
word- like lay.

References
Mark E. Lehman (1993) Developmental Differences in Vowel Duration in Open and
Closed Syllables Perceptual and Motor Skills: Volume 77, Issue 2, pp. 471-481.
Luigi Burzio, (1993) English Stress, Vowel Length and Modularity, Journal of
Linguistics, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Sep., 1993) , pp. 359-418, Published by: Cambridge
University Press
D. Kimbrough Oller (1971), The effect of position in utterance on speech segment
duration in English, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Volume 54, Issue
5 (published 1973).

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