Nonlinearity between acoustics and articulation in Hungarian transparent vowels

Abstract

We present novel results from the acoustic and articulatory investigation of the production of the transparent vowels (TVs) /i/, /i:/, /e:/ in Hungarian (colon denotes length). The acoustic measurements of the front–back distinction (second formant, the difference of the first and second formants [Ladefoged, 1993]) show that the effect of adjacent back vowels on the front quality of the TVs is only weakly significant. The articulatory measurements of the same data, however, show that adjacent back vowels cause highly significant retraction of the tongue body during the production of the front TVs. The significance of this finding lies in its relevance to the relationship between phonetics and phonology. Our results demonstrate that minor phonetic differences in articulation, impossible to access by traditional theory, correlate with full-fledged phonological alternation of suffix selection in Hungarian. Traditional phonological accounts predict no effect of continuous phonetic details on discrete phonological generalizations. This is supported in our acoustic data but contrasts with our articulatory findings. In the paper we propose a dynamic model where phonological transparency is directly related to nonlinearity between acoustics and articulation [Stevens, 1989; Wood, 1979]. [Work supported by NIH.]