Variation among accents of English in timing and rhythm has important potential implications for speech comprehension and conversational alignment among speakers of different accents. We investigate the production of such variation in two accents, Standard Southern British English (SSBE) and Standard Scottish English (SSE), focusing on timing relationships within the foot. Specifically, we explore the empirical support for Abercrombie’s (1964, 1979) distinction among trochaic foot types. Abercrombie (1964) proposes three foot types, differing in terms of the phonological weight of the first syllable and the presence of a word boundary, with timing relationships as follows for RP: A, ‘short-long’ in filler, city; B, ‘equal-equal’ in feeler, seedy; C, ‘long-short’ in feel a[live]). Abercrombie (1979) further observes that B feet have a ‘long-short’ pattern in Yorkshire English, and a ‘short-long’ pattern in Scottish accents. Surprisingly, these observations have received little empirical attention.
We report investigation of spontaneous speech from middle-class speakers of SSBE spoken in Cambridge, and SSE spoken in Glasgow. 50 phrase-medial tokens of each of A, B, and C feet were analysed (matched as far as possible for phonological composition, with (C)VCVC the majority pattern) and compared the durations of the strong and weak syllable. Results show only partial support for the Abercrombian foot distinctions within either accent, but do demonstrate cross-accent differences, mainly in terms of the greater absolute and relative duration of weak syllables in SSE than SSBE. We outline the design of a production study that aims to quantify these differences more precisely, and that will form the basis for a perception experiment testing the effect of timing disruption on lexical access.