Suprasegmental Features

The consonants and vowels constitute the segments or individual speech

sounds. They are meaningless unless they are combined to form a bigger unit,
i.e. word. The segments are classified based on their state of the glottis, the
place and manner of articulation, the tongue height and advancement, the
rounding of the lip, as well as the laxness and tenseness.
Above the segmental values of speech sounds, there are also length,
intonation, tone, and stress that establish the suprasegmental features. They do
not characterize an individual phonetic segment, but a sequence of them.
Therefore, it is hardly, or even impossible, to identify the quality of a
suprasegmental feature if we hear just a single segment. To see what
suprasegmental features are involved, we have to compare different segment
and utterances, instead

Length
a. Length
Length is about the duration and often measured in second or millisecond.
It can be about the vowel and consonant length, syllable length, and
utterance length. Some speech sounds are inherently longer than others. For
example, we may perceive that tense vowels (e.g., [i] and [u]) are slightly
longer than lax vowels (e.g., [ɪ] and [ʊ], but only by a few milliseconds.
Similarly, the voiced is longer than voiceless consonants. Long vowels and
consonants are marked with a colon [:]; segments without this symbol are
assumed to be short.
The duration of a speech sound may also be influenced by the sounds
around it. In English, a vowel followed by a voiced consonant is about 1.5
times longer than the same vowel followed by a voiceless consonant. For
example, the sound [ɪ] in [hɪːd] is longer than [ɪ] in [hɪt]; [æ] in [bæːd] is
longer than [æ] in [bæt]. Additionally, the length of a vowel may also be
affected by the place and manner of articulation of the consonant that follow
it. Try to say the word bees and bead. How does the length of [i] in the first
word differ from the second.
The length of syllables and utterances may vary for a number of different
reasons. For example, in English, we may say “biiiiig” to emphasize the
word, such as a little child told his mother after he saw a caterpillar on a
branch of lemon tree “It’s a biiiiig caterpillar”. The word, however, is still
big. You may also say “nooooo” to accentuate your refusal, but the word no
is not changed. The changing of thetempo of an utterance may increase of
decrease depending on its context, e.g., speaking in your native language to a
friend or a foreigner who just learnt the language.
In some languages, on the other hand, substituting a long segment for an
otherwise identical short segment (or vice versa) can result in a different
word. For example, in Finish, both vowels and consonants may be either
long or short, and the contrast can make a difference in the meaning of a
word.