The behavior of affricates under restricted lengthening conditions

Abstract

This study uses affricates as a test case for lengthening processes in speech. In general, consonants can lengthen as the result of phonological factors, such as a geminating suffix, or as the result of phonetic factors such as position within a phrase (Keating et al. 2003, Byrd et al. 2000, 2005). In Hungarian and many other languages, however, the presence of an additional consonant restricts phonological lengthening because CCC clusters containing geminates are ill‐formed (Kenesei et al. 1998). Acoustic duration measurements were used to examine whether this restriction also holds for phonetic lengthening. Initial results from three male Hungarian speakers indicate that it does not. Consonants in phrase‐final position are significantly longer than their counterparts in phrase‐medial position, whether they stand alone or in a cluster. A focus on lengthened affricates, however, reveals that the ‘‘shape’’ of lengthening differs in these two conditions. Affricates in the stand‐alone condition lengthen in a lopsided fashion, showing increases primarily in frication duration; those in the cluster condition lengthen more symmetrically, with increases in both stop closure and frication durations. These findings provide new support for the idea that affricates possess different structures at different levels of analysis (Lombardi 1990, Clements 1999).