Cross-linguistic timing contrast in geminates: A rate-independent perspective

In addition to durational differences between singletons and geminates, the phonetic implementation of gemination may have implications for most, if not all of a form’s phonetic shape, including temporal differences in adjacent vowels (Engstrand & Krull 1994, Payne 2005, Ridouane 2007). Variation in speech rate may have dramatic influence on these temporal characteristics. A consequence of this is that a singleton in slow rate may display longer duration than a geminate in fast rate, thus resulting in a non-contrastive overlap (e.g. Pind 1995, Picket et al. 1999, Hirata & Whiton 2005). In this study, we provide evidence that (i) singletons and geminates duration scale almost linearly with speech rate, with geminates being more affected by speech rate; and (ii) that scaling as well as the vowel-consonant-vowel relations differ across languages. While we assume that there is no global speech rate mechanism, however, our results indicate that rate-normalized measures could transcend the languages under investigation.