Hungarian neutral vowels: A microcomparison

Blaho, Sylvia; Szeredi, Daniel

doi:10.7557/12.2499

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Variation in Hungarian vowel harmony has been studied in detail (Ringen & Kontra 1989, Hayes & Cziráky Londe 2006, Hayes et al 2009, Kálmán, Rebrus & Törkenczy 2012, Blaho & Szeredi 2013, Forró 2013. Basically there are three kinds of variation: (i) lexical variation in anti-harmony, (ii) vacillation due to the "Count Effect" (that a sequence of neutral vowels is variably less transparent than a single one) and (iii) vacillation due to the "Height Effect" (the tendency that more open neutral vowels are more variably transparent than less open ones (even when only one occurs)).…”

Section: Variation In Hungarian Front/back Harmonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Monotonicity and the limits of disharmony

Rebrus

Törkenczy²

2016

AMP

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The attested front/back harmony systems are monotonic in the sense thatthe harmony function that assigns the values front and back to suffixes ingiven harmonic stem contexts is subject to a constraint that only permitscontiguous patterns of values on a universally fixed scale of harmoniccontexts (ranging from the prototypical back harmony context [...B]_ tothe prototypical front one [...F]_ ). We argue that monotonicity alsoconstrains variation (harmony patterns involving the harmonic valuefront/back) and show that in Hungarian the harmonic properties of a stem(front, back, variable front/back) are inherited by the forms derived fromthe stem by inflection or derivation. This paradigm uniformity effect(Harmonic Uniformity) results in subpatterns of front/back harmony whichalso conform to monotonicity. We demonstrate this using frequency datafrom a corpus study.

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Section: Variation In Hungarian Front/back Harmonymentioning

confidence: 99%

Monotonicity and the limits of disharmony

Rebrus

Törkenczy²

2016

AMP

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“…Specifically, we will discuss variation in anti-harmony and transparency. In order to be able to do this, we will have to go into some descriptive detail about anti-harmony and transparency in Hungarian, a harmony system in which variation in harmony has been studied in detail (Ringen and Kontra 1989;Hayes and Cziráky Londe 2006;Benus and Gafos 2007;Hayes et al 2009;Kálmán et al 2012;Rebrus et al 2012;Blaho and Szeredi 2013;Törkenczy et al 2013;Rebrus and Szigetvári 2013;Forró 2013). …”

Section: Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Monotonicity and the typology of front/back harmony

Rebrus

Törkenczy

2015

Theoretical Linguistics

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In this paper, we analyse the surface patterns of suffix harmony in front/back harmony systems as the harmonic values front and back being assigned to harmonic contexts consisting of strings of syllables combining front, back and neutral nuclei. We claim that the harmonic contexts can be arranged in a fixed (universal) scale, the frontness/backness scale, with reference to which the possible (i.e. attested) front/back harmony systems can be characterised in a simple way: only those systems are possible where the assignment of values to the harmonic contexts is monotonic, which makes sure that only contiguous (non-interrupted) sequences of harmonic values are assigned to the harmonic contexts. We give formal definitions of monotonicity in terms of ordering and similarity and discuss predictions about possible harmony systems that follow from monotonicity (which we claim are borne out). These predictions are typological: harmony systems can show disharmonic behaviour, but in a principled way: only those systems exist (at least in front/back harmony) that exhibit a monotonic pattern. In the second half of the paper, we discuss variation in harmony and analyse in detail variation in anti-harmony and transparency in Hungarian, which is thus an example of a variable harmony pattern. We argue that variable front/back harmony patterns assign a "variable" value to some harmonic contexts in addition to the front and back values and can be shown to be constrained by monotonicity, whose definition is naturally extendable to patterns with variation. We discuss both the ordering-based and the similarity-based definitions and the predictions about possible variable harmony systems that follow from the definitions. One of the main predictions of the paper is a consequence of monotonicity: the locus of the variation in a pattern occurs only "in between" non-variable subpatterns. We explore a possible way of quantification in which we identify the harmonic values with the relative token frequency of the forms where the number associated with a variable value is p such that 0

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“…If the coarticulation effects on transparent vowels applies only in articulation, as suggested in previous research (Blaho & Szeredi 2013;Szeredi 2016), then the effects on learning might only be captured using a production-based task. Glewwe (2019) suggests that substantive biases in phonology arise from production, rather than perception, and production-based learning tasks are the best, if not only way to capture these effects.…”

Section: Figure 2 Experiments 2 Results (Means and Standard Errors Of The Mean)mentioning

confidence: 86%

“…This could be done using syn-thetic speech, where it is possible to directly manipulate the acoustic (e.g., F2) values of the transparent vowels in different contexts, or directly within Praat, the method used by Szeredi (2016). However, it is unclear what kind of external validity such effects would have, as the acoustical measurements for Transparent vowels in Hungarian were quite small, and showed many idiosyncrasies, including some participants showing an effect in the opposite direction (Szeredi 2016;Blaho & Szeredi 2013).…”

Section: Figure 2 Experiments 2 Results (Means and Standard Errors Of The Mean)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, there is some reason to be skeptical that the articulatory differences between transparent vowels in various contexts may have any effect on learning and generalization. Some research on the acoustics of transparent vowels in Hungarian showed null or mixed results (Blaho & Szeredi 2013;Szeredi 2016). While the acoustic differences trended in the direction shown in Benus and Gafos (2007), they did not always reach statistical significance, suggesting that the effects on perception and learnability might be minimal.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coarticulation and learnability of transparent vowels in vowel harmony

Finley

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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The representations of transparent vowels in vowel harmony have been of interest to phonologists because of the challenges they pose for constraints on locality and complexity. One proposal is that transparent vowels in back vowel harmony may be intermediate between front and back. The present study uses two artificial language learning experiments to explore the psychological reality of acoustic differences in transparent vowels in back vs. front vowel contexts. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony language with a neutral vowel that was spliced so that the F2 was lower in back vowel contexts and higher in front vowel contexts (the Natural condition) or the reverse (the Unnatural condition). While only participants in the Natural condition of Experiment 1 were able to learn the behavior of the transparent vowel relative to a No-Training control, there was no difference between the Natural and Unnatural conditions. In Experiment 2, only participants in the Natural condition learned the vowel harmony pattern, though there were no significant differences between the two conditions. No condition successfully learned the behavior of the transparent vowel in Experiment 2. These results suggest that the effects of small differences in the F2 value of transparent back vowels on learnability are minimal.

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Hungarian neutral vowels: A microcomparison

Cited by 9 publications

References 14 publications

Monotonicity and the limits of disharmony

Monotonicity and the limits of disharmony

Monotonicity and the typology of front/back harmony

Coarticulation and learnability of transparent vowels in vowel harmony

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