Voicing, aspiration, and vowel duration in Hindi

Abstract

There is extensive evidence that consonantal laryngeal features modulate preceding vowel duration (Chen, 1970). However, it is not clear if both consonant voicing and aspiration affect preceding vowel duration. Previous studies 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). Furthermore, the locus of the explanation of these effects is unresolved (Kluender et al, 1988; Fowler, 1992). We conducted an experiment on 7 native standard Hindi speakers, who produced 10 repetitions of 12 nonsense words ending in [d, dh, t, th] that had 3 different CVCVC contexts. In this article we focus on standard Hindi to show the following: (a) As with other languages, there is a vowel duration difference before voiced and voiceless consonants coda (syllable-final) consonants, (b) Vowel durations preceding aspirated coda consonants are longer than those before unaspirated coda consonants, (c) Closure durations of coda consonants are longer for unaspirated consonants and voiceless consonants, (d) Finally, when crucial confounds are controlled for, there is a slight positive, not negative, correlation between coda consonant duration and preceding vowel length.