A mássalhangzók és magánhangzók időtartama, valamint a magánhangzós fonológiai hosszúsági kontraszt kényelmes tempójú és felgyorsított beszédben

Deme, Andrea and Juhász, Kornélia and Szánthó, Zsuzsa and Zsoldos, Szabina and Reinhold, Greisbach (2025) A mássalhangzók és magánhangzók időtartama, valamint a magánhangzós fonológiai hosszúsági kontraszt kényelmes tempójú és felgyorsított beszédben. ALKALMAZOTT NYELVTUDOMÁNY, 25 (2). pp. 1-20. ISSN 1587-1061 (nyomtatott), 2498-4442 (online)

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Abstract

In fast speech, speech sounds are produced with shorter durations. However, according to widely accepted assumptions, not all speech sounds can be reduced to the same extent in fast speech. Specifically, i) vowels are expected to be more compressible and to be reduced more in duration than consonants. This assumption is supported by several empirical studies (Kozhevnikov & Chistovich, 1965: 2 Russian speakers; Wood, 1973: 2 Swedish speakers, and 1 speaker of British English, Chinese, Polish, German, Egyptian Arabic; Lo & Sóskuthy, 2023: 20-40 speakers of Korean, mandarin Chinese, Amharic, Georgian, Swahili, Turkish, Vietnamese, English). However, further thorough and systematic investigation of the question (ideally in other languages genetically unrelated to those previously studied) is still warranted. Additionally, in languages that exhibit phonemic vowel-length contrast, such as Japanese and Hungarian, vowels are also expected to vary in the extent of durational reduction as a function of their phonological length. First, ii) in fast speech, long vowels are expected to reduce more than short vowels (Port et al., 1980; Pind, 1999; Svastikula, 1986; Hirata, 2004), although some studies showed that reduction affects duration of long and short vowels equally (Magen & Blumstein, 1993). Second, iii) related to the asymmetrical reduction of long and short vowels in fast speech, the vowel length contrast is also expected to be endangered. Previous studies on Japanese showed that although vowel distinction, as expressed in duration differences between long and short vowel pairs, is indeed reduced in fast speech, the duration ratio of the pairs remains relatively robust across speech rates (Hirata, 2004). In the present study, we tested the 3 statements above in Hungarian. We analysed consonant and vowel durations produced by 15 Hungarian speakers in CVC-shaped real words, at comfortable and fast speech rates. In these sequences, V was one of the following 6 vowels that constitute long-short vowel pairs in Hungarian: /u/, /uː/, /i/, /iː/, /ɒ/, or /aː/. To control for place of articulation effects (and to create a linguistic material matching that we designed to study similar questions in German), in the onset of the one-syllable words, we placed laryngeal or alveolar consonants /h z s t r/, while in the coda, velar and alveolar consonants /z t d k n r/ were placed. Target words were embedded in a carrier sentence that ensured target vowels bore a sentence-level accent. We recorded samples in two speech rate conditions: i) at a comfortable speech rate (“normal” speech), and ii) at maximum speech rate (“fast” speech). Each participant produced 6 repetitions of each token. First, we found that the tested vowels were inherently longer than consonants at a comfortable speech rate, and in fast speech, they also reduced in duration more. Second, as expected, we also found that phonologically long vowels were longer in normal speech and reduced more than short vowels. Third, we found that the duration differences between long and short vowels decreased in fast speech, but the duration ratio of the relevant pairs remained relatively stable across speech rates. The duration ratio only reduced in the high front pair /i iː/, where short vowel variants in normal speech were extremely short, and this levelled out in fast speech. To conclude, results on Hungarian speech segments provide support to the assumption that vowels are more compressible than consonants in their duration. We also found that Hungarian exhibits asymmetrical reduction of long and short vowels, similar to several further languages (e.g., Japanese; Hirata, 2004). Lastly, analysis of duration relations showed that the phonological contrast, as expressed in the duration ratio of the relevant pairs, was maintained across speech rates. These findings contribute to our better understanding of how linguistically relevant phonological features and/or contrasts are realized at the segmental level, and how segmental reduction is implemented when speakers must sacrifice precise articulation to achieve other phonetic—or more broadly, communicative—goals.

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