Anne Pycha

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Deep differences between phonetic and phonological lengthening: Evidence from speech production

Anne Pycha
IRCS, University of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

An accurate characterization of the interface between phonetics and phonology is essential for understanding the extent to which abstract linguistic units derive from the physical facts of speech. Yet developing this characterization is a difficult task, because many phonetic and phonological processes resemble one another quite closely, differing only in degree. In this talk, I pursue the hypothesis that such processes must also differ in type: specifically, they differ both in their shape (their effect on the internal structure of segments) and in their distribution. I test this idea in two Hungarian speech production studies that compare the phonetic process of final lengthening with the phonological process of gemination. Results indicate that the phonetic process lengthens the internal structure of consonants in a local manner with an unrestricted distribution, while the phonological process does so in an anti-local manner with a highly restricted distribution. The implication is that, despite surface resemblances, phonetic and phonological processes are not mere variants of one another, and abstract linguistic units do not always derive from the physical facts of speech.