Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Word-initial: U[Phr[istanbuldaki W[X]sokaµ tSok gyzel bir jerdir
istanbul-loc-pcp street very nice one place-pred
The X street in Istanbul is a very nice place.
Four native speakers of Istanbul Turkish were recorded reading the stimulus sentences
from a randomized list. Again, the sentences were revealed to the speakers one by one,
such that a short pause was induced following each sentence. Recording sessions took
place at UC Berkeley and the Bosphorus University in Istanbul. Recordings were
digitized at 22.5 KHz. and vowel durations were measured from waveforms and
spectrograms using the Praat 3.9.5 speech analysis software (Copyright 1992-2000 by
Paul Boersma and David Weenink).
4.5.2.2. Results
The results of this experiment are shown in (48). It becomes clear immediately
that for each speaker, mean durations of initial-syllable vowels are significantly longer
than those of the vowels of second syllables. This conclusion was supported by the
results of two-tailed t-tests in which analysis of the durational difference between initial
and non-initial syllables for each environment and every speaker showed significance at p
< .05.
319