Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Flemming (to appear) follows Lindblom (1963) and others in attributing
neutralizations of height contrasts in durationally impoverished syllables to the
comparatively longer duration needed to achieve the open upper vocal tract required to
produce a higher F1. One way of adapting to the durational limitations of unstressed
syllables would be to speed up articulatory movements sufficiently so that the more open
target articulations of non-high vowels could be reached in the time allotted them.
Flemming attributes the failure of a language to implement this alternative to a desire to
minimize articulatory effort where possible. The other option, short of expending that
additional effort or violating restrictions on the durations of unstressed vowels is to
articulate the vowel in such a way that it falls short of its articulatory targets.
In this new, more crowded vowel space, of course, perceptual problems produced
by spectral overlap in the realizations of unstressed vowels, are compounded by the
shorter time the listener has to correctly identify a comparatively indistinct vowel. This
situation causes frequent misperceptions, which can ultimately result in the loss of the
contrasts in question. This reinterpretation is the phonologization process which produces
systems of unstressed vowel reduction. While section 2.1.1. demonstrated the enormous
crosslinguistic variation found in the merger patterns between the stressed and unstressed
vowels of otherwise identical inventories, the merger patterns attested are not completely
arbitrary. Rather, each set of mergers represents plausible groupings of vowels according
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