The implications of temporal patterns for the prosody of boundary signaling in connected speech

The objective of the study is to further examine the implications of recent research concerning the status of duration in boundary signaling in languages in which duration plays a contrastive role in the suprasegmental system. The issues addressed are (i) the extent to which durational patterns in the temporal organization of connected speech differ from those observed in controlled experiments, and (ii) how the realization of timing strategies can be related to the prosodic manifestations of boundary signaling. It is argued that the four timing strategies in Skolt Sami (a Finno-Ugric language) that were observed during a series of controlled experiments appear to have a clearly noticeable hierarchy in terms of their occurrence in connected speech. The study evaluates the characteristics of this hierarchy. Concerning the second issue it is claimed that the analysis described has produced results which correspond with the implications of other recent research: i.e. showing that languages with contrastive duration tend not to utilize duration for additional functions in the grammar, in this case boundary signaling