Voicing, aspiration, and vowel duration in Hindi

Abstract

There is extensive evidence that consonantal laryngeal features modulate adjacent vowel duration (Chen 1970). However, it is not clear if both consonant voicing and aspiration affect vowel duration. Previous studies (on Hindi) produced inconsistent results with respect to the effect of consonant aspiration on vowel duration, while finding a clear positive correlation with consonant voicing (Maddieson & Gandour 1976; Ohala & Ohala 1992; Lampp & Reklis 2004). We conducted an experiment on 7 native standard Hindi speakers, who produced 10 repetitions of 12 nonsense words ending in [d̪, d̪h, t̪, t̪h] that had 3 different CVCVV contexts. The results of the experiment show that there is a statistically significant main effect of coda voicing on vowel duration and a marginally significant main effect of aspiration on vowel duration. Furthermore, the effect of the aspirated coda consonants on vowel duration appears to be modulated by the surrounding segmental context. The results suggest that both consonant voicing and aspiration increase adjacent vowel duration. The results also suggest that the inconsistent findings in previous studies with respect to the effect of aspiration could be the result of differing phonetic contexts of the relevant segments.