Duration

Though we asked narrators to pronounce words as uniformly as possible both in tone and speed, a common tendency was observed; when speaking discrete words they unconsciously pronounced short words with slow tempo and used fast tempo for long words. This fact means that syllable duration strongly depends on word length. A further study of recorded narration samples revealed that the beginning and end syllables of a word have longer duration than the middle ones; this shows that syllable duration also depends on mora position.