14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Phonemic Length and Pre-Boundary Lengthening: An Experimental Investigation on the Use of Durational Cues in Hungarian

Beth Ann Hockey (1), Zsuzsanna Fagyal (2)

(1) Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science; (2) French Department;
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, IL, USA

The use of increased duration to signal prosodic boundaries has been demonstrated for many languages. However, a number of studies have claimed that languages, in which length is phonemic do not have pre-boundary lengthening or the amount of lengthening at boundaries is not perceptually relevant. We show that for Hungarian, a language with phonemic length, there is consistent preboundary lengthening at three levels: word, syllable and phone. The amount of pre-boundary lengthening observed in our data was well within the limits of perceptible phonemic contrasts shown for short and long vowels and consonants in Hungarian.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hockey, Beth Ann / Fagyal, Zsuzsanna (1999): "Phonemic length and pre-boundary lengthening: an experimental investigation on the use of durational cues in Hungarian", In ICPhS-14, 313-316.