Earticle

This paper attempts to find supporting evidence for Rice"fs (1996) and many others"f argument that the low vowels, [a] and [.], as in banana and teriyaki, are heavier enough to attract stress than non"]low vowels, and thus they are less likely to be followed by a geminate consonant even when they occur in penultimate stressed syllable than the other singleton vowels in English. To find whether the claims are backed up, I examined words with three and four syllables from the CELEX (Baayen, Piepenbrock and Gulikers 1995). The results of examination show that judging exclusively from the consonant doubling in tri"]and quadric syllabic words, the high vowel [.] rather than low vowels seems to be heavier than the others since it can easily get stressed in the light penultimate syllable even without consonant doubling. These findings are somewhat contradictory to previous claims; [.] is a high vowel; both phonological and phonetic phenomena have suggested that low vowels would be heavier or have more moras than non low vowels.