Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

elevant to the present study for their help in understanding how the phonologization of
final syllable effects proceed from the level of the phrase to the level of the word It is
difficult in some respects to compare the results of these studies directly. For an
experiment to show conclusively how two languages differ in their implementation of
final lengthening at a given prosodic level, extreme care would have to be taken not only
to replicate general aspects of experimental design and presentation, but in particular to
make certain that the domains correspond to comparable levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy
in both languages, that target phrases and words were of the same length, that syllabic
and segmental environment in the vicinity of the boundaries were identical, and so forth.
Studies of this type, preferably of languages otherwise with dissimilar prosodic systems,
are sorely needed for further progress in understanding the extent of possible variation in
the implementation of final lengthening. In addition, while many studies or descriptions
report only utterance-final lengthening, it is often not clear whether other phrasal
domains were tested or observed at all. Be this as it may, we can draw a number of
important generalizations from the studies on this question: A number of studies (e.g.
Beckman and Edwards 1990, Cho 2001, de Jong and Zawaydeh 1999, Ueyama 1999)
have shown the magnitude of pre-boundary lengthening effects to be greater, the higher
the level of the prosodic domain in which the relevant syllables are final. Thus, de Jong
and Zawaydeh find for Jordanian Arabic the least lengthening before boundaries of non-
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