Regional Variation in Phonetic Responses to Time Pressure in Tehrani and Isfahani Varieties

In languages and varieties, the exact locations of the alignment of f0 transition points differ from those of the segmental string (Ladd, 2006). The differences of inter-languages or inter-varieties are sometimes so small that it is not possible to identify a deep representation. We conducted a production experiment with 40 speakers of two regional varieties of Persian language. The aim of the present study was to investigate the strategies used by the speakers of the varieties in response to the time pressure caused by reduced sonorant rime of target words by adopting autosegmental-metrical theory (Pierrehumbert, 1980). For this purpose, 20 Isfahan speakers and 20 Tehrani speakers were asked to repeat the three target words, which were accompanied by a decrease sonorant rime, in the positions of nuclear pitch accent twice. Three prosodic parameters, such as contour conditionm alignment, and duration of the segments containing pitch accents, were mainly considered. The results showed that in each contour condition, the duration of the sonorant rime of the nuclear accented word was varied. In the phonetic domain, the range of adjustments fell into three broad categories. First, the speakers of Isfahani variety took more time by increasing the duration of the rime in the fall-rise condition while retracting the peak of the fall-rise contour. However, the speakers of Tehrani variety worked harder by compressing contours in the fall contour. Both speakers of the two varieties took shortcuts by truncating responses of the final pitch movements. The responses were shown to be dialect-specific and contour-specific.