ISCA Archive issp 2024
ISCA Archive issp 2024

Segmental durations and the vowel length contrast in fast speech in Hungarian

Andrea Deme, Kornélia Juhász, Zsuzsa Szánthó, Szabina Zsoldos, Reinhold Greisbach

In fast speech, speech sounds are produced shorter. However, according to previous studies, i) vowels are more compressible, and reduce more than consonants. In languages that show phonemic vowel length contrast, like Japanese, and Hungarian, vowels are also expected to vary in the extent of reduction as a function of their phonological length: in fast speech, ii) long vowels are expected to reduce more than short vowels, while iii) the vowel length contrast (as expressed in duration ratio) does not neutralize completely, as shown for Japanese. In this study, we analyzed consonant and vowel durations produced by 15 Hungarian speakers at comfortable and fast speech rates and tested these three hypotheses. We found that in fast speech in Hungarian, i) vowels reduced more in their duration than consonants; ii) long vowels reduced more than short vowels; and iii) duration differences of long and short vowels reduced, but duration ratio of the relevant pairs decreased only in the high front pair, while it did not reach complete neutralization in any of the pairs, meaning that the phonologically relevant contrast was maintained across speech rates.