Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

initial consonant serves to enhance the contrast between it and the following vowel.
Additionally, building on work by Hsu and Jun (1998) on Taiwanese, they hypothesize
(and demonstrate for Korean stops as noted above) that other strengthening patterns serve
to enhance paradigmatic contrasts (in the Korean case, those between lenis, fortis and
aspirated stops). Cho and Jun (2000: 67) themselves suggest directly that these phonetic
strengthening processes may serve to enhance the segmentation of the uninterrupted
speech stream into smaller units, in addition to potentially facilitating lexical access. The
parallels here should be abundantly clear between phonetic syntagmatic strengthening of
the initial CV contrast and phonological Positional Augmentation of word-initial onsets
on the one hand, and phonetic paradigmatic strengthening of initial consonants and
phonological positional neutralization of consonantal contrasts in non-initial positions on
the other hand.
Domain-initial strengthening of vowels of initial syllables with onsets, however,
has not been documented in any of the studies cited above. Cho and Jun (2000) note that
domain-initial strengthening seems to target exclusively that first segment of the word of
domain-initial position (in contrast with final lengthening, which targets the entire final
rhyme, and often more). Byrd (2000) discusses this pattern together with final
lengthening in the context of an experiment assessing the lengthening of gestures on both
sides of a phrase boundary. As noted in Chapter 3, she attributes the lengthening of both
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