Domain-initial Strengthening and Vocal Effort

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate Domain-initial Strengthening from the perspective of vocal effort. By examining vowels after different types of prosodic boundaries, the present study verified whether vowels are strengthened domain-initially, and whether there is an acoustic effect. In the formant analysis, domain-initial onsetless vowels are marginally articulated in the vowel space compared to domain-initial vowels in /pV/, but when the onset condition is the same, no significant difference was found in the comparison of vowels in different prosodic positions. Under the premise that more vocal effort would be expended when speakers pronounce initially strengthened vowels, spectral tilts and Cepstral Peak Prominence analyses were also conducted. However, these two acoustic measures did not show any systematic difference across various boundary conditions, and neither did a vowel duration analysis. These consistent results from four different acoustic measures lead to the conclusion that even though the DIS effect on consonants is robust across various kinds of languages, it is not evident at least in Korean vowels