A relationship between coarticulation and compensatory shortening.

A comparison of the literatures on coarticulatory influences of a stressed vowel on consonants and unstressed vowels and on 'compensatory shortening' of stressed vowels in the contexts of consonants and unstressed vowels suggests that the two timing effects may be related. An experiment was conducted to provide an explicit comparison and to test a hypothesis that compensatory shortening and coarticulation are not separate timing phenomenona. The two timing effects were found to pattern very similarly and both to be predicted by Lindblom and Rapp's compensatory shortening formula. 5 of 6 subjects showed significant correlations between coarticulation and shortening.