The long and the short and the final: phonological vowel length and prosodic timing in Hungarian

Abstract

The phonological vowel and consonant length distinctions in languages such as Hungarian may provide a constraint on the degree to which prosodic structure can influence speech segment duration. Here we show that, like many other languages, Hungarian does mark prosodic structure with durational variation, in particular, utterance-final lengthening.There is an influence of phonological vowel length on the locus of utterance-final lengthening: long and short vowels are lengthened in absolute-final syllables; long vowels are also lengthened in penultimate syllables. Lengthening within pitchaccented words, observed in languages such as English, appears absent, however. Furthermore, we do not find support for the inverse relationship between word length and stressed vowel duration suggested by previous studies.