Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

ehaviors as infant babbling, musical performance, and bird song and insect chirps lead
Johnson and Martin (2001) (among others) to speculate that final lengthening is in fact a
property of motor performance in general.
However wide-spread, it is clear that domain-final lengthening is nonetheless
subject to significant language-specific variation. Johnson and Martin (2001) cite
Delattre’s 1966 study of syllable durations in four languages, in which French, English,
Spanish and German are shown to differ in the magnitude of final lengthening observed
in comparable domains, and in Johnson and Martin’s study, Creek is seen to differ from
all four of these in degree of lengthening. To this we may add the comparative study of
accentual and final lengthening in English and Dutch of Cambier-Langeveld (1999),
which shows that while English words with phrasal accent in phrase-final position are
longer than unaccented phrase-final words, in Dutch items in phrase-final position
undergo the same amount of lengthening whether accented or not. Unfortunately, most
studies of domain-final lengthening to date have focused only on a single language, such
that there is a pressing need for additional comparative studies to determine the extent of
crosslinguistic variation in the implementation of this possibly otherwise universal
phenomenon.
A number of studies of final lengthening have been devoted to determining the
extent of its operation in prosodic domains of different levels. These are especially
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