Effects of delayed auditory feedback interacting with prosodic structure

Abstract

Speakers usually respond to time-delayed auditory feedback (DAF) by decreasing their speech rate (i.e., lengthening syllables). However, the syllable position in prosodic structure may affect syllabic prominence and duration. In the present study, we investigated whether the lengthening effect of DAF on syllables could depend on their position in French utterance. We analyzed recordings of several repetitions of three five-syllables French sentences from 10 French speakers under three conditions of DAF (0, 60, 120ms). The results suggest that the duration of syllables is generally longer when DAF is present, and it increases with the increasing DAF level. Accented vowels are more lengthened by DAF in relation to nonaccented vowels in the same accentual group. Final sentence vowels, which bear the nuclear pitch accent and may be additionally affected by final lengthening, could even be more lengthened by DAF. Given that the extent of lengthening effect is not correlated with the original syllabic duration, we assume that the greater lengthening effect on accented vowels could not be due to the longer duration of these vowels in general. Overall, our results suggest that speakers’ responses to DAF depend on the syllabic status in the prosodic hierarchy.