According to most current theories, the Hungarian vowel system involves 14 vowels that correspond to seven vowel pairs, each differentiated by quantity. However, there are phenomena both on the phonological and the phonetic level which suggest that for low, mid, and high vowels a separate evaluation of the quantity opposition is necessary. In order to test this, we conducted a perception test, in which embedded and isolated vowels spoken by a native Hungarian speaker were to be identified by native listeners. The results show that the perception of vowel length and vowel quality (i.e. the formant structure) closely interacts in Hungarian. Low vowels, for which short and long realisations differ in quality, i.e. in vowel height, were seldom identified incorrectly. For embedded high vowels, duration was not obviously regarded as a crucial cue for identification by the subjects, nor were they clearly differentiated by the speaker. Mid vowels showed a mixed behaviour: they were differentiated regarding their duration and formant structure in production, however, this information was only partly used by the listeners. The fact that vowel quantity distinction in Hungarian is only maintained where there is a perceivable quality difference shows that the role of quantity is not as dominant as it has been regarded for long

Mády, Katalin

Reichel, Uwe D.

English

According to most current theories, the Hungarian vowel system involves 14 vowels that correspond to seven vowel pairs, each differentiated by quantity. However, there are phenomena both on the phono-logical and the phonetic level which suggest that for low, mid, and high vowels a separate evaluation of the quantity opposition is necessary. In order to test this, we conducted a perception test, in which em-bedded and isolated vowels spoken by a native Hun-garian speaker were to be identified by native listen-ers. The results show that the perception of vowel length and vowel quality (i.e. the formant struc-ture) closely interacts in Hungarian. Low vowels, for which short and long realisations differ in qual-ity, i.e. in vowel height, were seldom identified in-correctly. For embedded high vowels, duration was not obviously regarded as a crucial cue for identi-fication by the subjects, nor were they clearly dif-ferentiated by the speaker. Mid vowels showed a mixed behaviour: they were differentiated regarding their duration and formant structure in production, however, this information was only partly used by the listeners. The fact that vowel quantity distinc-tion in Hungarian is only maintained where there is a perceivable quality difference shows that the role of quantity is not as dominant as it has been regarded for long

Katalin Mády

Uwe D. Reichel

CiteSeerX

Quantity distinction in the Hungarian vowel system – just theory or also reality

Universität München: Elektronischen Publikationen

QUANTITY DISTINCTION IN THE HUNGARIAN VOWEL
SYSTEM—JUST THEORY OR ALSO REALITY?
Katalin Mády (1,2) and Uwe D. Reichel (1)
(1) Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, University of Munich, Germany
(2) Institute of German Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic Univers ty, Hungary
mady|reichelu@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de
ABSTRACT
According to most current theories, the Hungarian
vowel system involves 14 vowels that correspond to
seven vowel pairs, each differentiated by quantity.
However, there are phenomena both on the phono-
logical and the phonetic level which suggest that for
low, mid, and high vowels a separate evaluation of
the quantity opposition is necessary. In order to test
this, we conducted a perception test, in which em-
bedded and isolated vowels spoken by a native Hun-
garian speaker were to be identified by native listen-
ers.
The results show that the perception of vowel
length and vowel quality (i.e. the formant struc-
ture) closely interacts in Hungarian. Low vowels,
for which short and long realisations differ in qual-
ity, i.e. in vowel height, were seldom identified in-
correctly. For embedded high vowels, duration was
not obviously regarded as a crucial cue for identi-
fication by the subjects, nor were they clearly dif-
ferentiated by the speaker. Mid vowels showed a
mixed behaviour: they were differentiated regarding
their duration and formant structure in production,
however, this information was only partly used by
the listeners. The fact that vowel quantity distinc-
tion in Hungarian is only maintained where there is
a perceivable quality difference shows that the role
of quantity is not as dominant as it has been regarded
for long.
Keywords: Hungarian, vowel system, perception,
quantity, quality.
1. INTRODUCTION
Hungarian contains 14 vowels which are generally
regarded as seven quantity pairs of the classes /i/, /y/,
/u/, /e/, /ø/, /o/, /a/. (In this paper, we refer to vowel
classes by the quality of the long vowel.) Several
arguments support the assumption that quantity has
a primary distinctive function:
(1) There are minimal pairs with all vowel classes
where distinction is achieved by vowel quan-
tity: hal – hál (‘fish’ – ‘he sleeps’),kor – kór
(‘age’ – ‘disease’),birtok – bírtok(‘property’ –
‘you bear’).
(2) Short and long vowels can occure in open or
closed syllables. Thus, vowel length (= quan-
tity) is an independent distinctive feature and
not part of a complementary distribution.
(3) The orthography is based on the assumption
that long and short vowels correspond to each
other (long vowels are marked by an accent:<í
ű ú éő ó á>).
On the other hand, some vowel pairs differ largely
in their phonetic realisations, while others (almost)
do not. Thus, unrounded central low /a:/ has a back
mid-low or low counterpart that is usually regarded
as round mid-low /O/ by Hungarian phoneticians,
and mid-high front /e:/ goes together with mid-low
front /E/.
The /a/ and /e/ classes are often classified aslow
[8], while mid-high /o/ and /ø/ are regarded asmid
as opposed to thehigh vowels /i/, /y/ and /u/.
There is no general agreement as to what extent
mid and high vowels differ in quality according to
their length. Past and current research has led to con-
siderably different conclusions: some authors claim
that all mid and high vowel pairs are realised dif-
ferently, others have not found any remarkable dif-
ference in any of these classes, while a third group
of authors underline the interconnection between de-
gree of opennes (i.e. high vs. mid) and quality dif-
ference: high vowels differ less in quality than mid
vowels. (For an overview, see [3].) In a recently
developed Hungarian speech synthesis system, long
mid and long high vowels were generated from their
short counterparts [6].
On the other hand, the distribution of vowel length
is restricted in some positions. Firstly, word final /o/
and /ø/ are always long. Secondly, in Educated Col-
loquial Hungarian (but not in orthography and Elab-
orated Hungarian!), vowel quality is predictable for
high vowels in most positions, with the excepction
of stressed nonfinal syllables [8].
Another difference between the categories high,
mid, and low is observed when the vowel is in mor-
pheme final position. Low vowels are always length-
ened when they are followed by a suffix, e.g. for
plural: fa – fák(‘tree(s)’),este – esték(‘evening(s)’)
etc. (N.B. Hungarian is a so-called agglutinating
language, thus, most grammatical relations are ex-
pressed by suffixes.) This rule does not apply to
word final high vowels:kapu – kapuk(‘gate(s)’),
bébi – bébik(‘baby’ – ’babies’) etc. As short mid
vowels never occur word finally, the above rule is
not relevant for this category.
Despite the counterarguments above, most au-
thors (both phonologists and phoneticians) agree
that quantity is a primary distinctive feature in the
Hungarian vowel system. However, Kassai [2] and
Kovács [3] point out the necessity of a distinction
according to vowel height. Furthermore, Kassai
refers to Sauvageot (1964) where the latter claims
that quantity distinction is disappearing from Hun-
garian and is only maintained for vowel pairs that
are distinct in their quality. In all other cases, vowel
length is neutralised.
The distinctive role of vowel length in Hungarian
has only partly been confirmed by recent perception
experiments. While Gósy [1] found an obvious in-
fluence of duration on vowel length decisions in her
synthesised material, Kovács [3], who used embed-
ded vowels uttered by a human speaker, came to the
conclusion that the perceptive boundaries of vowel
length are clearly connected to duration under and
above a given cut-off value, while durations between
these boundaries are mainly influenced by the for-
mant structure.
In a previous paper, we have presented a com-
parison between German and Hungarian vowels [5].
Among others, we investigated vowel duration of
short and long vowels in both languages. We found
that Hungarian short and long vowels differ far
less from each other in their duration than German
ones. This result was unexpected, as in German
vowel length differences are mostly accompanied by
a difference in vowel quality (tenseness), thus, one
would expect that vowel duration does not play a
central role in this language. On the other hand,
in a language like Hungarian that is said to have
a quantity-based vowel system, one would expect
clear duration differences.
In the present paper, we will investigate the per-
ceptive role of vowel duration and vowel quality (i.e.
the formant structure). We will seek an answer to
the question (1) whether there is an interaction be-
tween vowel length and vowel quality, (2) whether
identification by listeners is related to the acoustic
features of these categories, and (3) whether high,
mid, and low vowels trigger different perceptional
behaviours. Another paper in this volume describes
a different approach to the same data [7], in which
human perception is being compared with machine
learning based on decision trees.
2. MATERIAL AND METHODS
The experiment was based on a corpus in which
all the vowels of Hungarian were uttered between
voiced or voiceless velar consonants in a carrier sen-
tence. All tokens were repeated ten times by a 21-
year-old male speaker of Hungarian. The data we
used were originally recorded as part of a former
articulatory study with electromagnetic articulogra-
phy, the outcomes of which will be related to our
present findings in a following paper.
37 native speakers of Hungarian (14–44 years, 10
males, 27 females) participated in the study. In the
first part, they were asked to identify the vowel in
nonsense words with the structure /gVgO/ or /kVkO/.
They were given the possibility to listen twice to
each stimulus, then they had to choose one of the 14
vowels displayed on the screen. In the second part,
they had to listen to isolated vowels which all had the
same length (40 msec, corresponding to the short-
est duration in the data set) and were weighted by
a Tukey window (taper sections each set to 5 msec).
The subjects were told that the second part of the ex-
periment was based exactly on the same vowels as
they had listened to in the first part, i.e. they knew
that half of the items originated from long vowels.
The analysis of perception of embedded and iso-
lated vowels was based on several acoustic measure-
ments performed in Praat: duration of the first and
second vowel and of both consonants (as absolute
and relative values), pitch, and the first three for-
mants in Hertz and in Bark (the median was calcu-
lated with a window size of 20 msec and a time step
of 5 msec). In the present paper, duration of the first
(= target) vowel and its F1 and F2 will be discussed
in detail. The impact of temporal structure, pitch,
and consonant voicing are discussed in [7].
3. RESULTS
3.1. Vowel duration and formant structure in
production
Duration measurements showed that in production,
vowel length was mostly associated with durational
differences, thus, long vowels had an overall longer
duration than short vowels. Long and short /a/ were
kept apart by a gap between 100 and 130 msec. For
/o/, /ø/, and /e/, a duration of 100 msec could belong
to both vowel quantities, all other short vowels being
shorter and vice versa. On the other hand, high vow-
els showed a relatively large overlap between 70 and
120 msec where both short and long vowels could
appear.
The formant structure revealed an interesting dis-
tribution (Fig. 1): the low vowels /a:/, /O/, /E/ and the
short mid vowels /o/ and /ø/ clearly differed from
each other and from all other vowels. Long mid
front and long high front vowels were located closer
to each other, but there was little or no overlap be-
tween /i:/ and /e:/, /y:/ and /ø:/, respectively. How-
ever, high short vowels were distributed over the
area of both neighbouring vowels, that is to say, /i/
could not be differentiated from /i:/ and /e:/, etc. To
put it more generally, while both long mid and long
high front vowels were produced by the speaker with
relatively little variation and were kept apart regard-
ing their formant structures, high short vowels were
characterised by large variation and a less specific
formant structure. This is also true for short /u/,
while the formant values for /o:/ overlap those for
/u:/.
Figure 1: Short and long vowels in the articula-
tory space. Vowel quality is given in SAMPA.
3.2. Perception of isolated vowels
Vowel identifications were summarised for all sub-
jects to each vowel class (see image file 1, which
contains a confusion matrix with all data). There
was a strong tendency to identify long vowels as
their short counterpart. This tendency was not found
for low vowels: /a:/ was identified correctly in
93.9%, as opposed to mid-high /e:/ with only 39.7%
correct identifications. Thus, while the short stim-
ulus duration was probably misleading for the sub-
jects, the decisions were not exclusively based on
duration.
The tendency to perceive originally long vowels
as short ones can often be explained by the distri-
bution of vowels in the articulatory space: as the
formant structure of /e:/ partially overlaps the for-
mant structure of /i , it is not surprising that subjects
tended to identify /e:/ as /i/. The same was true for
/i:/, /ø:/, /y:/, and /u:/.
It is somewhat surprising, however, that the long
mid vowels /o:/ and /ø:/, the short realisations of
which obviously differ from the long ones in their
formant structure, were identified correctly in less
than 20% of the cases. In order to test whether other
factors than F1 and F2 were responsible for these
misidentifications, additional t-tests were performed
based on delta formants (F3–F2, F2–F1, F1–F0) for
long mid vowels that were identified as a long, or as
a short mid vowel. However, none of the differences
was significant (givenα = 0.05).
3.3. Perception of embedded vowels
In the embedded context, subjects were provided
with the entire CVCA sequence. As shown in the
image file 2, the low vowels /E , /a:/ and /O/ were
correctly identified in more than 98% of the cases.
On the other hand, /e:/ was almost never misheard
as /E/ but quite frequently as /i: (17.3%).
Mid vowels showed a specific behaviour: while
erroneous identifications of the short segments were
mostly substitutions by their long counterpart (/o:/
for /o/: 4.8%, /ø:/ for /ø/: 11.1%), long vowels were
seldom misheard as short vowels, they were rather
perceptually shifted upwards, especially in the case
of /e: that was most often misheard as /i:/.
The same tendency was observed for high vowels,
where the proportion of incorrectly identified vowels
in embedded context was larger. The correct identi-
fications of short high vowels ranged between 70%
and 75%, and in case of an erroneous identification,
they were most often heard as their long counterparts
(around 18%). Long /i:/ and /y:/ were less error-
prone, while the proportion of correct identifications
of /u:/ was again relatively low. In the case of false
identifications, long mid vowels were preferred for
/i:/, /y:/, and /u:/. This tendency was independent of
the formant structure and of duration (for other fac-
tors, like voicing of the flanking consonants and F0,
see [7].
4. DISCUSSION
The results presented above reveal a strong corre-
lation between length and quality in the Hungarian
vowel system. Both vowel production and percep-
tion seem to rely on different patterns dependent on
vowel height. Listeners were able to identify the low
vowels /a:/, /O/, and /E/ with ease, both in embedded
and isolated experimental settings. In production,
long and short /a/ were distinguished by an obvious
difference in duration and in the formant structure.
The opposite can be said about the high vowels /i/,
/y/ and /u/: short and long vowels had partly overlap-
ping durations, and their identification was not pos-
sible on the basis of F1 and F2 (though the distribu-
tion was not identical: formants for long high vow-
els varied much less than for their short equivalents).
The patterns observed for mid vowels can be located
between those for low and high vowels. While long
and short vowels only slightly overlapped regard-
ing their durations and clearly differred in their for-
mant structures, none of this information was neces-
sarily interpreted by the listeners. The mixed class
/e/ (short low /E/ and long mid /e:/) revealed a dual
behaviour: in production, the two sounds reflected
the patterns observed for /o/ and /o/ (little overlap of
duration, distinct formant structure), while /E/ was
much better identified in both the embedded and iso-
lated context, than was /e: . As opposed to the mid
vowels /o/ and /ø/, /e:/ and /E/ were not interchanged
in perception.
These findings support that the role of quantity
in the Hungarian vowel system cannot be defined
in general, it should be rather regarded according to
vowel height. The idea proposed by Sauvageot, that
the quantity distinction is loosing its importance in
favour of the quality opposition, cannot be fully re-
jected. It is possible that the Hungarian vowel sys-
tem is in a changing state. This could explain the
transitional behaviour of the mid vowel classes.
The results raise two further questions of a more
general nature. Firstly, there seems to be a strong
tendency across listeners to hear short vowels as
long, but not vice versa. Moreover, the misidenti-
fication of long vowels as another long vowel was
not enhanced by the formant structure of the data
used here (as no overlap for any of the long vowels
was found). Clearly, the tendency cannot simply be
ascribed to undershoot, at least not based on these
data.
Secondly, there is a discrepancy between the pro-
duction and the perception of the mid vowels /o/ and
/ø/. While the speaker clearly produced short and
long vowels differently, the listeners did not use this
information for their decisions. This finding is con-
tradictory to Lindblom’s hyper- and hypoarticula-
tion theory, which states that speakers make as much
effort to speak clearly as is required for maintaining
the auditorily relevant difference [4]. However, na-
tive Hungarian listeners do not seem to be aware of
the quality difference between short and long /o/ and
/ø/. This contradiction might be based on the artic-
ulatory variance of these sounds through different
speakers, or on the secondary role of the quality dif-
ference for these sounds. As the next step, we will
investigate the production of several speakers in or-
der to provide a more detailed analysis of these ques-
tions. At the same time, a perception experiment
based on different age groups could reveal more in-
formation about the question whether the Hungarian
vowel system is undergoing a change at present.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank to Christian Geng, ZAS,
Berlin, for providing us with the acoustic data. The
research activity of the first author has been sup-
ported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation,
Germany.
6. REFERENCES
[1] Gósy, M. 2002. Magánhangzók változása az idő
függvényében. In: Hunyadi, L., (ed),Kísérleti
fonetika – laboratóriumi fonológia. Debrecen: Kos-
suth Egyetemi Kiadó 7–20.
[2] Kassai, I. 1979. Időtartam és kvantitás a magyar
nyelvben. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
[3] Kovács, M. 2002.Tendenciák és szabályszerűségek
a magánhangzó-időtartamok produkciójában és per-
cepciójában. PhD thesis Debreceni Egyetem.
[4] Lindblom, B. 1990. Explaining phonetic variation: a
sketch of the H and H theory. In: Hardcastle, W. J.,
Marchal, A., (eds),Speech Production and Speech
Modelling. Dordrecht: Kluwer 403–439.
[5] Mády, K., Tronka, K. Z., Reichel, U. D. 2005. Sylla-
ble cut and energy contour in vowels: a comparative
study in German and Hungarian.ZAS Papers in Lin-
guistics42, 197–217.
[6] Olaszy, G. 2006.Hangidőtartamok és időszerkezeti
elemek a magyar beszédben. Budapest: Akadémiai
Kiadó.
[7] Reichel, U. D. 2007. Comparing human and machine
vowel classification.Proc. 16th ICPhS Saarbrücken
(accepted).
[8] Siptár, P., Törkenczy, M. 2000.The Phonology of
Hungarian. Oxford: University Press.


Quantity distinction in the Hungarian vowel system - just theory or also reality?

Open Access LMU

QUANTITY DISTINCTION IN THE HUNGARIAN VOWELSYSTEM—JUST THEORY OR ALSO REALITY?Katalin Mády (1,2) and Uwe D. Reichel (1)(1) Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, University of Munich, Germany(2) Institute of German Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungarymady|reichelu@phonetik.uni-muenchen.deABSTRACTAccording to most current theories, the Hungarianvowel system involves 14 vowels that correspond toseven vowel pairs, each differentiated by quantity.However, there are phenomena both on the phono-logical and the phonetic level which suggest that forlow, mid, and high vowels a separate evaluation ofthe quantity opposition is necessary. In order to testthis, we conducted a perception test, in which em-bedded and isolated vowels spoken by a native Hun-garian speaker were to be identified by native listen-ers.The results show that the perception of vowellength and vowel quality (i.e. the formant struc-ture) closely interacts in Hungarian. Low vowels,for which short and long realisations differ in qual-ity, i.e. in vowel height, were seldom identified in-correctly. For embedded high vowels, duration wasnot obviously regarded as a crucial cue for identi-fication by the subjects, nor were they clearly dif-ferentiated by the speaker. Mid vowels showed amixed behaviour: they were differentiated regardingtheir duration and formant structure in production,however, this information was only partly used bythe listeners. The fact that vowel quantity distinc-tion in Hungarian is only maintained where there isa perceivable quality difference shows that the roleof quantity is not as dominant as it has been regardedfor long.Keywords: Hungarian, vowel system, perception,quantity, quality.1. INTRODUCTIONHungarian contains 14 vowels which are generallyregarded as seven quantity pairs of the classes /i/, /y/,/u/, /e/, /ø/, /o/, /a/. (In this paper, we refer to vowelclasses by the quality of the long vowel.) Severalarguments support the assumption that quantity hasa primary distinctive function:(1) There are minimal pairs with all vowel classeswhere distinction is achieved by vowel quan-tity: hal – hál (‘fish’ – ‘he sleeps’), kor – kór(‘age’ – ‘disease’), birtok – bírtok (‘property’ –‘you bear’).(2) Short and long vowels can occure in open orclosed syllables. Thus, vowel length (= quan-tity) is an independent distinctive feature andnot part of a complementary distribution.(3) The orthography is based on the assumptionthat long and short vowels correspond to eachother (long vowels are marked by an accent: <íu˝ ú é o˝ ó á>).On the other hand, some vowel pairs differ largelyin their phonetic realisations, while others (almost)do not. Thus, unrounded central low /a:/ has a backmid-low or low counterpart that is usually regardedas round mid-low /O/ by Hungarian phoneticians,and mid-high front /e:/ goes together with mid-lowfront /E/.The /a/ and /e/ classes are often classified as low[8], while mid-high /o/ and /ø/ are regarded as midas opposed to the high vowels /i/, /y/ and /u/.There is no general agreement as to what extentmid and high vowels differ in quality according totheir length. Past and current research has led to con-siderably different conclusions: some authors claimthat all mid and high vowel pairs are realised dif-ferently, others have not found any remarkable dif-ference in any of these classes, while a third groupof authors underline the interconnection between de-gree of opennes (i.e. high vs. mid) and quality dif-ference: high vowels differ less in quality than midvowels. (For an overview, see [3].) In a recentlydeveloped Hungarian speech synthesis system, longmid and long high vowels were generated from theirshort counterparts [6].On the other hand, the distribution of vowel lengthis restricted in some positions. Firstly, word final /o/and /ø/ are always long. Secondly, in Educated Col-loquial Hungarian (but not in orthography and Elab-orated Hungarian!), vowel quality is predictable forhigh vowels in most positions, with the excepctionof stressed nonfinal syllables [8].Another difference between the categories high,mid, and low is observed when the vowel is in mor-pheme final position. Low vowels are always length-ened when they are followed by a suffix, e.g. forplural: fa – fák (‘tree(s)’), este – esték (‘evening(s)’)etc. (N.B. Hungarian is a so-called agglutinatinglanguage, thus, most grammatical relations are ex-pressed by suffixes.) This rule does not apply toword final high vowels: kapu – kapuk (‘gate(s)’),bébi – bébik (‘baby’ – ’babies’) etc. As short midvowels never occur word finally, the above rule isnot relevant for this category.Despite the counterarguments above, most au-thors (both phonologists and phoneticians) agreethat quantity is a primary distinctive feature in theHungarian vowel system. However, Kassai [2] andKovács [3] point out the necessity of a distinctionaccording to vowel height. Furthermore, Kassairefers to Sauvageot (1964) where the latter claimsthat quantity distinction is disappearing from Hun-garian and is only maintained for vowel pairs thatare distinct in their quality. In all other cases, vowellength is neutralised.The distinctive role of vowel length in Hungarianhas only partly been confirmed by recent perceptionexperiments. While Gósy [1] found an obvious in-fluence of duration on vowel length decisions in hersynthesised material, Kovács [3], who used embed-ded vowels uttered by a human speaker, came to theconclusion that the perceptive boundaries of vowellength are clearly connected to duration under andabove a given cut-off value, while durations betweenthese boundaries are mainly influenced by the for-mant structure.In a previous paper, we have presented a com-parison between German and Hungarian vowels [5].Among others, we investigated vowel duration ofshort and long vowels in both languages. We foundthat Hungarian short and long vowels differ farless from each other in their duration than Germanones. This result was unexpected, as in Germanvowel length differences are mostly accompanied bya difference in vowel quality (tenseness), thus, onewould expect that vowel duration does not play acentral role in this language. On the other hand,in a language like Hungarian that is said to havea quantity-based vowel system, one would expectclear duration differences.In the present paper, we will investigate the per-ceptive role of vowel duration and vowel quality (i.e.the formant structure). We will seek an answer tothe question (1) whether there is an interaction be-tween vowel length and vowel quality, (2) whetheridentification by listeners is related to the acousticfeatures of these categories, and (3) whether high,mid, and low vowels trigger different perceptionalbehaviours. Another paper in this volume describesa different approach to the same data [7], in whichhuman perception is being compared with machinelearning based on decision trees.2. MATERIAL AND METHODSThe experiment was based on a corpus in whichall the vowels of Hungarian were uttered betweenvoiced or voiceless velar consonants in a carrier sen-tence. All tokens were repeated ten times by a 21-year-old male speaker of Hungarian. The data weused were originally recorded as part of a formerarticulatory study with electromagnetic articulogra-phy, the outcomes of which will be related to ourpresent findings in a following paper.37 native speakers of Hungarian (14–44 years, 10males, 27 females) participated in the study. In thefirst part, they were asked to identify the vowel innonsense words with the structure /gVgO/ or /kVkO/.They were given the possibility to listen twice toeach stimulus, then they had to choose one of the 14vowels displayed on the screen. In the second part,they had to listen to isolated vowels which all had thesame length (40 msec, corresponding to the short-est duration in the data set) and were weighted bya Tukey window (taper sections each set to 5 msec).The subjects were told that the second part of the ex-periment was based exactly on the same vowels asthey had listened to in the first part, i.e. they knewthat half of the items originated from long vowels.The analysis of perception of embedded and iso-lated vowels was based on several acoustic measure-ments performed in Praat: duration of the first andsecond vowel and of both consonants (as absoluteand relative values), pitch, and the first three for-mants in Hertz and in Bark (the median was calcu-lated with a window size of 20 msec and a time stepof 5 msec). In the present paper, duration of the first(= target) vowel and its F1 and F2 will be discussedin detail. The impact of temporal structure, pitch,and consonant voicing are discussed in [7].3. RESULTS3.1. Vowel duration and formant structure inproductionDuration measurements showed that in production,vowel length was mostly associated with durationaldifferences, thus, long vowels had an overall longerduration than short vowels. Long and short /a/ werekept apart by a gap between 100 and 130 msec. For/o/, /ø/, and /e/, a duration of 100 msec could belongto both vowel quantities, all other short vowels beingshorter and vice versa. On the other hand, high vow-els showed a relatively large overlap between 70 and120 msec where both short and long vowels couldappear.The formant structure revealed an interesting dis-tribution (Fig. 1): the low vowels /a:/, /O/, /E/ and theshort mid vowels /o/ and /ø/ clearly differed fromeach other and from all other vowels. Long midfront and long high front vowels were located closerto each other, but there was little or no overlap be-tween /i:/ and /e:/, /y:/ and /ø:/, respectively. How-ever, high short vowels were distributed over thearea of both neighbouring vowels, that is to say, /i/could not be differentiated from /i:/ and /e:/, etc. Toput it more generally, while both long mid and longhigh front vowels were produced by the speaker withrelatively little variation and were kept apart regard-ing their formant structures, high short vowels werecharacterised by large variation and a less specificformant structure. This is also true for short /u/,while the formant values for /o:/ overlap those for/u:/.Figure 1: Short and long vowels in the articula-tory space. Vowel quality is given in SAMPA.3.2. Perception of isolated vowelsVowel identifications were summarised for all sub-jects to each vowel class (see image file 1, whichcontains a confusion matrix with all data). Therewas a strong tendency to identify long vowels astheir short counterpart. This tendency was not foundfor low vowels: /a:/ was identified correctly in93.9%, as opposed to mid-high /e:/ with only 39.7%correct identifications. Thus, while the short stim-ulus duration was probably misleading for the sub-jects, the decisions were not exclusively based onduration.The tendency to perceive originally long vowelsas short ones can often be explained by the distri-bution of vowels in the articulatory space: as theformant structure of /e:/ partially overlaps the for-mant structure of /i/, it is not surprising that subjectstended to identify /e:/ as /i/. The same was true for/i:/, /ø:/, /y:/, and /u:/.It is somewhat surprising, however, that the longmid vowels /o:/ and /ø:/, the short realisations ofwhich obviously differ from the long ones in theirformant structure, were identified correctly in lessthan 20% of the cases. In order to test whether otherfactors than F1 and F2 were responsible for thesemisidentifications, additional t-tests were performedbased on delta formants (F3–F2, F2–F1, F1–F0) forlong mid vowels that were identified as a long, or asa short mid vowel. However, none of the differenceswas significant (given α = 0.05).3.3. Perception of embedded vowelsIn the embedded context, subjects were providedwith the entire CVCA sequence. As shown in theimage file 2, the low vowels /E/, /a:/ and /O/ werecorrectly identified in more than 98% of the cases.On the other hand, /e:/ was almost never misheardas /E/ but quite frequently as /i:/ (17.3%).Mid vowels showed a specific behaviour: whileerroneous identifications of the short segments weremostly substitutions by their long counterpart (/o:/for /o/: 4.8%, /ø:/ for /ø/: 11.1%), long vowels wereseldom misheard as short vowels, they were ratherperceptually shifted upwards, especially in the caseof /e: that was most often misheard as /i:/.The same tendency was observed for high vowels,where the proportion of incorrectly identified vowelsin embedded context was larger. The correct identi-fications of short high vowels ranged between 70%and 75%, and in case of an erroneous identification,they were most often heard as their long counterparts(around 18%). Long /i:/ and /y:/ were less error-prone, while the proportion of correct identificationsof /u:/ was again relatively low. In the case of falseidentifications, long mid vowels were preferred for/i:/, /y:/, and /u:/. This tendency was independent ofthe formant structure and of duration (for other fac-tors, like voicing of the flanking consonants and F0,see [7].4. DISCUSSIONThe results presented above reveal a strong corre-lation between length and quality in the Hungarianvowel system. Both vowel production and percep-tion seem to rely on different patterns dependent onvowel height. Listeners were able to identify the lowvowels /a:/, /O/, and /E/ with ease, both in embeddedand isolated experimental settings. In production,long and short /a/ were distinguished by an obviousdifference in duration and in the formant structure.The opposite can be said about the high vowels /i/,/y/ and /u/: short and long vowels had partly overlap-ping durations, and their identification was not pos-sible on the basis of F1 and F2 (though the distribu-tion was not identical: formants for long high vow-els varied much less than for their short equivalents).The patterns observed for mid vowels can be locatedbetween those for low and high vowels. While longand short vowels only slightly overlapped regard-ing their durations and clearly differred in their for-mant structures, none of this information was neces-sarily interpreted by the listeners. The mixed class/e/ (short low /E/ and long mid /e:/) revealed a dualbehaviour: in production, the two sounds reflectedthe patterns observed for /o/ and /o/ (little overlap ofduration, distinct formant structure), while /E/ wasmuch better identified in both the embedded and iso-lated context, than was /e:/. As opposed to the midvowels /o/ and /ø/, /e:/ and /E/ were not interchangedin perception.These findings support that the role of quantityin the Hungarian vowel system cannot be definedin general, it should be rather regarded according tovowel height. The idea proposed by Sauvageot, thatthe quantity distinction is loosing its importance infavour of the quality opposition, cannot be fully re-jected. It is possible that the Hungarian vowel sys-tem is in a changing state. This could explain thetransitional behaviour of the mid vowel classes.The results raise two further questions of a moregeneral nature. Firstly, there seems to be a strongtendency across listeners to hear short vowels aslong, but not vice versa. Moreover, the misidenti-fication of long vowels as another long vowel wasnot enhanced by the formant structure of the dataused here (as no overlap for any of the long vowelswas found). Clearly, the tendency cannot simply beascribed to undershoot, at least not based on thesedata.Secondly, there is a discrepancy between the pro-duction and the perception of the mid vowels /o/ and/ø/. While the speaker clearly produced short andlong vowels differently, the listeners did not use thisinformation for their decisions. This finding is con-tradictory to Lindblom’s hyper- and hypoarticula-tion theory, which states that speakers make as mucheffort to speak clearly as is required for maintainingthe auditorily relevant difference [4]. However, na-tive Hungarian listeners do not seem to be aware ofthe quality difference between short and long /o/ and/ø/. This contradiction might be based on the artic-ulatory variance of these sounds through differentspeakers, or on the secondary role of the quality dif-ference for these sounds. As the next step, we willinvestigate the production of several speakers in or-der to provide a more detailed analysis of these ques-tions. At the same time, a perception experimentbased on different age groups could reveal more in-formation about the question whether the Hungarianvowel system is undergoing a change at present.5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSWe would like to thank to Christian Geng, ZAS,Berlin, for providing us with the acoustic data. Theresearch activity of the first author has been sup-ported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation,Germany.6. REFERENCES[1] Gósy, M. 2002. Magánhangzók változása az ido˝függvényében. In: Hunyadi, L., (ed), Kísérletifonetika – laboratóriumi fonológia. Debrecen: Kos-suth Egyetemi Kiadó 7–20.[2] Kassai, I. 1979. Ido˝tartam és kvantitás a magyarnyelvben. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.[3] Kovács, M. 2002. Tendenciák és szabályszeru˝ségeka magánhangzó-ido˝tartamok produkciójában és per-cepciójában. PhD thesis Debreceni Egyetem.[4] Lindblom, B. 1990. Explaining phonetic variation: asketch of the H and H theory. In: Hardcastle, W. J.,Marchal, A., (eds), Speech Production and SpeechModelling. Dordrecht: Kluwer 403–439.[5] Mády, K., Tronka, K. Z., Reichel, U. D. 2005. Sylla-ble cut and energy contour in vowels: a comparativestudy in German and Hungarian. ZAS Papers in Lin-guistics 42, 197–217.[6] Olaszy, G. 2006. Hangido˝tartamok és ido˝szerkezetielemek a magyar beszédben. Budapest: AkadémiaiKiadó.[7] Reichel, U. D. 2007. Comparing human and machinevowel classification. Proc. 16th ICPhS Saarbrücken(accepted).[8] Siptár, P., Törkenczy, M. 2000. The Phonology ofHungarian. Oxford: University Press.

Comparinghumanandmachine vowel classiﬁcation.

Explainingphoneticvariation: a sketch of the H and H theory. In: Hardcastle,

Hangid˝ otartamok és id˝ oszerkezeti elemek a magyar beszédben. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

Id˝ otartam és kvantitás a magyar nyelvben. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

Magánhangzók változása az id˝ o függvényében. In: Hunyadi,

Syllable cut and energy contour in vowels: a comparative study in German and Hungarian.

Tendenciák és szabályszer˝ uségek a magánhangzó-id˝ otartamokprodukciójábanés percepciójában.

The Phonology of Hungarian.

http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13165/1/reichel_13165.pdf

Quantity distinction in the Hungarian vowel system - just theory or also reality?

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