Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

emain relatively stable, uninfluenced by duration down to approximately 60 ms., at
which point durational impoverishment begins to take its toll on the speaker’s ability to
realize a sufficiently open vocal tract to produce the F1 value otherwise specified for the
vowel in question.
(12) Russian first and second pretonic syllables: F1 vs. Duration
F1 in Hz
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
Russian Unstressed /a/ and /o/
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
Duration in ms.
Again, phonologically, the two “degrees” of reduction of /a, o/ in Russian turn out in fact
not to be representationally distinct at all. Rather, they are the result off a single set of
processes: phonological neutralization of unstressed /a/-/o/ to a single featural
specification (whatever we assume that to be), which then receives gradiently differing
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Series1
Series2