Lengthened affricates as a test case for the phonetics-phonology interface
Anne Pycha, University of California, Berkeley
Many phonetic and phonological processes resemble one another, which
has led some researchers to suggest that phonetics and phonology are
essentially the same. This study compares phonetic and phonological
processes of consonant lengthening by analyzing duration measurements
collected from Hungarian speakers (n=14). Affricates, which crucially
possess a two-part structure, were placed in target positions. Results
show that affricates regularly undergo phonetic lengthening at phrase
boundaries, and the affected portion of the affricate is always that
which lies closes to the boundary. Affricates also regularly undergo
phonological lengthening when next to a geminating suffix, but the
affected portion of the affricate is always the stop closure. Thus
while phonetic lengthening observes a strict respect for locality,
phonological lengthening does not, and we conclude that the two
processes are in fact quite different from one another.
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