Folia Uralica Debreceniensia 17. - Finnugor Nyelvtudományi Tanszék

ON THE EFFECT OF IMITATION IN NOVEL VOWEL QUALITIESventory, the vowel categories that are the most problematic for Hungarianlearners of Finnish are the front vowels /e, ӕ/ and the back vowels /ɑ, o/. Perfectphonetic equivalents for the Finnish /e, ӕ/ do not exist in standard Hungarian.Hungarian [e] is pronounced more open as /ӕ/, whereas in Finnish itis /e/. The closest equivalents of Finnish [ä] and [e] in Hungarian are [e] and[é], although, Hungarian open-mid [e] has only a short variant and close-mid[é] only a long variant. These differences in phoneme-grapheme correspondencescreate difficulties in the correct pronunciation of Finnish /e/. As aconclusion, it can be said that in addition to the different orthographic regulationsthe acoustic category boundaries and quantities of these two frontvowels differ as well. The same applies for Finnish back vowels /ɑ, o/. TheHungarian equivalent for Finnish /ɑ/ has only long variant /ɑ:/, whereas theshort variant is illabial /ɔ/. There are 4 back vowels in Hungarian /u, o, ᴐ, ɑ/while there are only 3 in Finnish /u, o ɑ/. The Hungarian back vowels differfrom their Finnish equivalents in terms of orthography, quantities andacoustic category boundaries. (Papp 1967, Häkkinen 1976, Karanko–Keresztes–Kniivilä1985, Maticsák–Tarvainen 2010, Kassai 2003, Gósy 2004.) Insum, it is very difficult for Hungarians to say a short /ɑ/ or /e/ as these phonemesdo not exist in Hungarian.In their study of Hungarians writing dictated Finnish words, Salamon andVaarala (1994) assumed that correct pronunciation of Finnish does not causeproblems for Hungarian learners, and it tends to be the writing, the phonemegraphemecorrespondences, and the different orthographic regulations whichare problematic. The hypothesis on writing difficulties was tested positiveand especially diphthongs proved to be problematic, familiar words being theeasiest to master. They also found that if the quantity of the vowel was heardincorrectly the Hungarians had great problem stating the correct consonantquantity as well. According to their subjects' comments, an /ɑ/ with two dotsmakes it impossible to learn Finnish. If /ӕ/ is considered as /ɑ/ with two dotsinstead of phoneme /ӕ/, it is quite easy to understand why the front vowel /ӕ/is difficult to master.2 Method2.1 StimuliThe stimuli consist of 24 Finnish question-answer pairs which were recordedin Helsinki in August 2010. The speaker was a 25-year-old phoneticianfrom Helsinki. Question-answer pairs were chosen because they betterrepresent the normal intonation pattern of a natural language. The sentences47