Disambiguating durational cues for speech segmentation.

Vowels are lengthened in lexically stressed syllables and also in word-final syllables. Both stress and final-syllable lengthening can assist in word segmentation from continuous speech, but in languages like English, with a preponderance of stress-initial words, lengthening cues may conflict for indicating word boundaries. An analysis of a large corpus of English speech demonstrated that speakers provide distributional information sufficient to potentially allow listeners to determine whether vowel lengthening is associated with lexical stress or word finality without relying on a congruence of multiple suprasegmental cues to make the distinction.