Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

opening showed minima in the second syllable, while unstressed vowels in final syllables
showed higher measures, suggesting supralaryngeal strengthening of final unstressed
vowels of the same type observed by Edwards, Beckman and Fletcher.
Cho (2001), in a detailed study of gestural strengthening in accented and
boundary-adjacent syllables in English found articulatory strengthening reminiscent of
that found in pitch accented syllables for preboundary vowels as well. Specifically, Cho
noted in domain-final vowels what he refers to as sonority enhancement, measured as a
lower tongue position and greater lip opening gesture for both phrase-final [o] and [a]. He
did not, however, record the lower jaw position found by Edwards et al. and Vayra and
Fowler, and which he himself notes for vowels under phrasal accent. Note, however, that
Cho measured only vowels carrying at least lexical stress, and then varied their prosodic
position with the phrase. Since the lower jaw position in final vowels recorded by both
Vayra and Fowler and Edwards et al. was found only for lexically unstressed vowels, it is
unsurprising that Cho saw no such effect 73 . In addition to this, Cho also demonstrated
increased resistance to vowel-to-vowel coarticulation for both accented and phrase-final
vowels, another result that provides insight into the phonetic origins of the phonological
final strength patterns described above. The fact that so many of the phonetic studies of
73
While Cho finds sonority expansion for domain-final vowels, he found no evidence of “featural
enhancement” of those same. Under accent, in agreement to some extent with the finding of de Jong
(1995), Cho found that [i] was realized fronter (but not necessarily higher) and that [a] was realized lower
(but not necessarily backer).
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