Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

fricatives, which in retrospect may have been an error, since these too are known to
impact negatively the durations of following vowels. The number of such tokens,
however, was relatively small, and evenly distributed between initial-syllable and second
syllable tokens. All target vowels occurred in open syllables, again with an eye to
reducing non-position-dependent durational variation. (42) shows a pair of tokens
illustrating the two types of stimuli.
(42) Syllable 1 vs. Syllable 2
màcerabílity anàphrodísiac
Each token was situated in three different frame sentences selected to place the target
word in initial position in a variety of prosodic domains à la Fougeron and Keating 1996.
The relevant domains were Utterance, Phonological Phrase, and Phonological Word. This
is shown in (43).
(43) Prosodic Environments
a. Utterance-initial: U[Phr[X is an interesting topic.
b. Phonological Phrase-initial: U[Phr[I think]Phr[X is an interesting topic.
c. Word-initial: U[Phr[Y X compound] is an interesting topic.
e.g. fish macerability, frog anaphrodisiacs, toe lacerability, plan irrationality
Participants were two native speakers of North American English raised in the
northeastern United States, one male and one female. Speakers read the test sentences
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