Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

measurements from 92 first pretonic vowels and 60 second pretonic. In some cases a
single token contained both. Results were as follows.
Durations did vary considerably as a function of speech rate. Mean durations over
both tempos were 83.5 ms. (s =13.8) for first pretonics and 40.8 ms. (s = 9.7) for second
pretonics. Mean durations for first pretonics at the faster rate were 75.3 ms. as compared
to 90.4 ms. at the slower rate. For second pretonics mean durations were 34.9 ms. at the
faster rate and 44.8 at the slower. Mean F1 for first pretonic vowels was 552.8 Hz (s =
37.1). For second pretonic vowels mean F1 was 462 Hz (s = 45.7). Neither durational nor
spectral differences between underlying /a/ or /o/ were found to be significant.
The most important result in the present context, however, is this: There was a
strong correlation between duration and F1 for second pretonic vowels (correlation
coefficient, r s (60) = .602, p < .0001) 30 . This can be seen in the scatterplot shown below 31 :
30 All statistics computed in StatView 5.0.1 (SAS Institute Copyright 1992-98) unless otherwise noted.
31 Scatterplots created with Microsoft Excel 98 (Copyright 1995-1998 Microsoft Corporation).
98