This paper investigates the effect of morphological embeddedness and lexical frequency on the duration of constituents in left- and right-branching NNN compounds from a corpus of spoken English (Boston University Radio Speech Corpus, Ostendorf et al., 1997). Theories assuming that the phonetic signal is not affected by the internal structure of multimorphemic words are opposed by empirical studies on the morpho-phonetic interface which provide evidence that the phonetic signal is sensitive to different morphological boundaries. The analysis of 465 NNN compounds reveals that morphological embeddedness alone does not have the expected effect on constituent durations, however, we detected a complex interplay of the morphological structure of NNN compounds and the two involved bigram frequencies. For instance, the duration of N2 in left-branching compounds is affected by the frequency of N2N3 even though these two constituents do not form a morphological unit in this type of NNN compound. This interplay may be interpreted as a listener-oriented strategy employed by the speaker in order to resolve potential conflicts between the frequency of adjacent constituents and the morphological structure: In such an instance, speakers appear to use acoustic duration to signal the branching direction of the triconstituent compound.

本文研究了形态嵌入和词汇频率对英语口语语料库中左右分支 NNN 复合词成分持续时间的影响（波士顿大学广播语音语料库，Ostendorf 等人，1997 年）。假设语音信号不受多态词内部结构影响的理论与形态-语音界面的实证研究相反，这些研究提供了语音信号对不同形态边界敏感的证据。对 465 种 NNN 化合物的分析表明，单独的形态嵌入对成分持续时间没有预期的影响，但是，我们检测到 NNN 化合物的形态结构和两个涉及的二元组频率之间存在复杂的相互作用。例如，左支化合物中 N2 的持续时间受 N2N3 频率的影响，即使这两种成分在此类 NNN 化合物中不形成形态单元。这种相互作用可以被解释为说话者为了解决相邻成分的频率和形态结构之间的潜在冲突而采用的面向听者的策略：在这种情况下，说话者似乎使用声学持续时间来发出信号分支方向的信号。三元化合物。