Lengthening Effects of Some Prosodic Constituents in Persian

This study examined constituent lengthening as a cue of prominence domains and prosodic boundaries. Two experiments have been conducted. The first experiment studied the effects of focus accent on syllable, vowel and consonant duration. The second experiment examined the effects of three distinct sentence types and the effects of four prosodic boundary categories on the duration of syllable, vowel and consonant. Five educated speakers of Persian uttered three keywords with three CV syllables in ultimate, penultimate and antepenultimate syllable position. Each keyword was produced in a carrier-sentence under four different focus accent positions in the first experiment and under four boundary categories and three sentence functions in the second one. The results of first experiment indicated that focus accented syllables had increased duration. Furthermore, focus accented initial syllables had increased duration which suggests initial lengthening effects due to syllable position and focus accent. The main findings of second experiment support word final lengthening and indicated significant effects of the sentence function on the duration of the syllable, vowel and consonant and of the boundary position on vowel, consonant and total syllable duration. Finally, the results are compared with the results of the experiments done in English.