Duběda, Tomáš

Mády, Katalin

White, Laurence

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Temporal marking of prominence in a typical and an atypical quantitylanguage: a comparative study of Czech and HungarianKatalin Ma´dy (1), Laurence White (2), and Toma´sˇ Dubeˇda (3)(1) University of Munich, Germany, (2) University of Bristol, UK, (3) Charles University in Prague, Czech Republicmady@phonetik.uni-muenchen.de, laurence.white@bristol.ac.uk, dubeda@ff.cuni.czIntroduction. The vowel systems of Czech and Hungarian include quantity as a dis-tinctive feature. Short and long vowels can occur in stressed or unstressed syllables withsimple or complex codas. For some vowel pairs, there is additional quality distinction: e.g.,compared to their long counterparts, Czech /i/ is centralised and /u/ is partly centralised,while Hungarian /e/ is lower and /a/ is rounded and backed [2]. Recent investigationson Hungarian show that vowels which differ in quality are also clearly distinguished byduration, whereas high vowels with a weak functional load of the quantity distinction tendto be neutralised both for duration and quality [5]. In many languages, segmental length-ening is one of the markers of prominence, both lexical stress and phrasal accent [4, 7].Stress is consistently word-initial in both Czech and Hungarian and thus not distinctive.Indeed, given the phonological length contrasts, temporal marking of prominence is po-tentially problematic. Accordingly, lengthening does not mark lexical stress in Czech [6],although previous findings for Hungarian are more ambigious [1, 3]. It is furthermoreunclear whether stress and accent are actually discriminated in terms of acoustic cues forCzech and Hungarian, or whether stress simply indicates the potential of the syllable tobear an accent in a focused word. Here we investigate the temporal correlates of stress infocused and non-focused words, considering also the influence of quality.Experiment. Five Czech speakers read a 661 word passage which included all monoph-thongs in stressed and unstressed nuclear and nonnuclear positions (nuclear position beingutterance-final in Czech). Ten Hungarian speakers read 12 sentences five times each. Shortand long /u/, /o/, /a/ occurred in the first (stressed) and last (unstressed) syllable oftrisyllabic targets in non-utterance-final words. The sentences also included stressed /e/in focused and non-focused words.Results. In Czech, phonological quantity distinction was marked by durational differ-ences for vowel pairs without an additional quality distinction (/e/, /a/, /o/), whileoverlapping durations were observed for the qualitatively distinct /i/, and also for /u/ toa lesser extent (Fig. 1). A repeated measures ANOVA for Czech showed that stress hadno significant effect on vowel duration, while both nuclear position and the interaction ofstress and nuclear position did: unstressed vowels in nuclear position were significantlylonger than stressed ones (due to utterance-final lengthening), and both were longer thannon-nuclear vowels. In Hungarian, the durational distinction was strong for low vowelswith an additional quality distinction and weak for high vowels with minimal or no qualitydistinction (Fig. 2). Stressed /a/, /a:/, /o/, and /o:/ were significantly longer than un-stressed ones. There was also a non-significant tendency for stressed vowels to be longerin focused than in non-focused words. (We will investigate this issue in the close future.)Conclusions. According to our findings, Czech reserves temporal cues for quantitydistinction and does not use them for prominence marking: syllables in nuclear-accentedphrase-final words are longer, but this progressive nature of this lengthening indicatesis association with the following phrase boundary rather than being nuclear accentuallengthening per se. except when prominence cooccurs with phrase-final lengthening. InHungarian, quantity opposition seems to be weakened: durational distinction is onlymaintained when supported by additional quality cues as in /a/ and less obviously for/u/ in unstressed syllables.lllllllllllllla a: e e: i i: o o: u u:50100150200250Stressed Czech vowelsnon−nuclear vowelsduration (ms)llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll lllla a: e e: i i: o o: u u:50100150200250Unstressed Czech vowelsnon−nuclear vowelsduration (ms)Figure 1: Duration of Czech vowels.llllla a: o o: u u:50100150Stressed Hungarian vowelsinitial vowels in trisyllabic wordsduration (ms)lllllla a: o o: u u:50100150Unstressed Hungarian vowelsinitial vowels in trisyllabic wordsduration (ms)Figure 2: Duration of Hungarian vowels /a/, /o/, /u/.References[1] I. Fo´nagy. A hangsu´lyro´l [On stress]. Nyelvtudoma´nyi E´rtekeze´sek 18. Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest,1958.[2] IPA. Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. University Press, Cambridge, 1999.[3] I. Kassai. Ido˝tartam e´s kvantita´s a magyar nyelvben [Duration and quantity in Hungarian]. Akade´miaiKiado´, Budapest, 1979.[4] D. H. Klatt. Linguistic uses of segmental duration in English: acoustic and perceptual evidence.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 59:1208–1220, 1976.[5] K. Ma´dy, L. Bombien, and U. D. Reichel. Is Hungarian losing the vowel quantity distinction? InProc. 8th International Seminar on Speech Production, Strasbourg, 2008. 445–448.[6] Z. Palkova´. Fonetika a fonologie cˇesˇtiny [Phonetics and phonology of Czech]. Karolinum, Prague,1997.[7] A. E. Turk and L. White. Structural influences on accentual lengthening in english. Journal ofPhonetics, 27:171–206, 1999.

Temporal marking of prominence in a typical and an atypical quantity language : a comparative study of Czech and Hungarian

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