Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

using electropalatography). In addition to gestural magnitude, closure durations of the
relevant initial consonants were also found to be greater than those of their word-internal
counterparts 117 . Laryngeal gestures have also shown significant enhancement in domain-
initial position. Specifically, glottal opening gestures (and likewise VOT of aspirated
stops) have been shown to increase in magnitude in English (Pierrehumbert and Talkin
1992), as does VOT in Korean (Keating, Cho, Fougeron and Hsu 1999). Moreover, Cho
and Jun (2000) actually demonstrate for Korean increased glottal airflow and VOT for
the lenis and aspirated series of stops, and decreased glottal airflow and VOT for the
fortis stops, suggesting a general enhancement of articulations producing cues important
to the perception of specific contrasts. A number of the initial strengthening studies have
also recorded an effect similar to that discussed in Chapter 3 in connection with the
implementation of final lengthening, to wit, that the degree of strengthening of domain-
initial articulations is greater at the boundary of higher-level prosodic domains (e.g. U,
IP, AP) and smaller at the left edge of lower-level constituents. Cho and Jun (2000) go
on, intriguingly, to characterize certain patterns of initial strengthening as functioning
specifically to enhance the syntagmatic contrast of the relevant segments. Thus, what
they characterize as an increase in the “consonantality” (Cho and Jun 2000: 58) of the
117
While both magnitude and duration were found to increase in a number of the relevant experiments,
correlation tests in Fougeron and Keating 1996 show that the direction or even existence of a causal
relationship between these two parameters is questionable.
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