Linguistic Correlates of Acoustic Duration in English Triconstituent Compounds
This paper investigates the effect of a range of variables on the acoustic duration of constituents in left- and right-branching NNN compounds derived from a corpus of spoken English (Boston University Radio Speech Corpus, \citealt{Ostendorf.1997}). Variables of interest include speaker-dependent as well as phonological, morphological and lexical factors. The analysis reveals that most variables affect constituent durations as expected, and only few predictors do not yield any effect on the acoustic signal. Furthermore, we detected a complex interplay of the morphological structure of NNN compounds and the two involved bigram frequencies. For instance, the duration of N2 in left-branching compounds is affected by the frequency of N2N3 even though these two constituents do not form a morphological unit in this type of NNN compound. This interplay may be interpreted as a way of resolving potential conflicts between the frequency of adjacent constituents and the morphological structure: In such an instance, speakers appear to use acoustic duration to signal the branching direction of the triconstituent compound.