Adaptive Dispersion Theory and Phonological Vowel Reduction in Russian

Abstract

Russian exhibits a rich pattern of phonological vowel reduction, by which somevowel contrasts are neutralized in unstressed syllables. Recent work in phonologysuggests a mechanism by which phonetic vowel reduction - compression of theoverall vowel space due to target undershoot - might lead to patterns like Russian.Presenting acoustic data from 9 speakers of Russian, we use Euclidean distancemeasures, measures of F1-F0 and F2-F1, and Bayesian classification to provide abasic picture of how the overall vowel space, as well as the distribution of vowels,change as stress is reduced. We are particularly interested in whether contraction ofthe vowel space in unstressed positions is primarily due to raising, and in whethercontrasting pairs of vowels are evenly spaced within and across contexts. Ourresults provide qualified support for the first hypothesis, but largely do not supportthe hypothesis of equal spacing, in particular across contexts. Of additional interest,we find that some impressionistically described neutralizations are incomplete.