Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Insofar, too, as the strong or weak licensing capacity of final position must be divined
from empirical evidence during the acquisition process, it is reasonable to question the
extent to which it is necessary or realistic to assume restriction in UG of the status vis-a-
vis potential neutralization patterns of any other specific position either.
Section 3.1 reviews arguments for the phonetic and psycholinguistic prominence
of final position, and section 3.2 catalogues and analyzes the phonological strength
effects which result from this prominence. Section 3.3 and 3.4 compare the strength
effects found in final position to those discussed in Chapter 2 for stressed syllables. The
problem of reconciling these effects with tendencies to phonetic and phonological
weakness in final syllables is taken up in 3.6, and Section 3.7 is devoted to the licensing
of vowel quantity in final position and its comparison with similar effects in stressed
syllables.
3.1. Final syllable prominence
3.1.1 Phonetic prominence
Domain-final syllables have been shown by many researchers to be the locus of a
certain degree of vowel lengthening (Oller 1973, Klatt 1975, 1976, Beckman and
Edwards 1987,Wightman et al. 1992, Keating, Wright and Zhang 1999, inter alia on
English). Lengthening effects of any kind are of immediate relevance to the present study
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