British plosives duration patterns in political speech

The paper aims to analyze duration patterns of British stops in political speech depending on the utterance information structure and prosodic prominence of a token. The hypothesis was that stops increase duration when located within informative tokens compared to non-informative tokens. The material was obtained from 3 British politicians recorded between 2006 and 2018. The total of 1009 words containing single plosives /k/, /t/, /p/, /ɡ/, /d/, /b/ were examined. The tokens were labeled as high or low informative by three experts in the field of English phonetics. Duration measurements were performed in PRAAT. The results show a consistent increase of total duration for stops within informative tokens compared to non-informative tokens, particularly for fortis /k/, /t/, /p/. The increase was achieved with the participation of both phases Ph1 (closure) and Ph2 (burst+friction) with higher increase of Ph1. The exception was voiceless /t/ whose duration increase resulted from equal increase of Ph1 and Ph2. Lenis /ɡ/, /d/, /b/ increased their duration mostly due to Ph1 without any significant reaction of Ph2 to information load. Prosodic prominence was another factor that in most cases resulted in total duration increase, particularly in case of emphatic stress.