It is well known that stressed vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants than before voiced, and that stressed vowels are shorter before an unstressed syllable in a bisyllabic word than in a monsyllabic word. A set of test materials was designed to study the interaction between these two rules. Results suggest that vowels become strongly incompressible beyond a certain amount of shortening and that vowel duration modification rules should have the form Do = k (Di − Dmin)+Dmin, where Di is the input duration to the rule, Do is the output duration of the rule, Dmin is the minimum duration for the vowel, and the scale factor k is greater than zero and depends on the particular rule. The data indicate that Dmin is about 45% of the inherent duration of a given vowel.
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