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Length as A Suprasegmental: Evidence from Speech Errors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Joseph Paul Stemberger
Joseph Paul Stemberger*
Affiliation:
Carnegie-Mellon University
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Abstract

Segmental length can be analysed in one of three possible ways: as a segmental feature, as gemination, or as a suprasegmental. These three analyses make different predictions about how length should behave in language production. Treating length as a suprasegmental predicts that it will frequently be dissociated from a segment, while the other analyses predict it will usually not be. Speech error corpora in German, Swedish, and English are examined. The data suggest a suprasegmental analysis, most probably along the lines of recent autosegmental descriptions: long segments are associated with two positions in the syllable structure. A vowel and its associated structure show different degrees of cohesiveness in different languages, so that they behave quite differently in errors in the different languages.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , December 1984 , pp. 895 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by the Linguistic Society of America

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