Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Whalen and Beddor also show, however, that lengthening of a vowel which is
already nasalized to some degree will increase the perceptual salience of that nasalization
significantly, which is to say that a slightly nasalized vowel will be perceived as nasal
more readily if it is longer. Whalen and Beddor note that this alone cannot explain the
susceptibility of /a/ to nasalization, since although low vowels do generally have longer
inherent durations than other vowels, these differences are not of the magnitude
necessary in their study to increase the percept of nasalization. Consider this evidence,
however, in light of nasalization in phrase-final position. Phrase-finally lengthening
routinely increases the durations of final vowels by the amount shown to be necessary by
Whalen and Beddor for an increased perception of nasalization on vowels which are
already partly nasalized. The facts of Vedic Sanskrit, associating nasalization with
positions of particularly dramatic vowel lengthening, agree very neatly with this line of
reasoning. Furthermore, since low vowels are the only ones which would have had any
degree of nasalization on them to begin with given the crosslinguistic characteristics of
their production, it is possible to understand why only they would be affected in these
circumstances. This account of the development of phrase-final nasalization in Sanskrit
does not require any phrase-final velic weakening to occur, though of course, neither
does it exclude it.
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