Progressive Utterance-Final Lengthening in Syllables with Final Fricatives

Abstract

The generality of the pattern of progressively greater lengthening within the utterance-final syllable, previously found with respect to final stops, is shown to extend to syllables in Hebrew with final fricatives. Seven native speakers of Hebrew read matched sentence pairs in which bisyllabic key words appeared in non-final and sentence-final position. Final fricatives showed almost four times as much utterance-final lengthening as the preceding stressed vowel. Final lengthening affected the duration of each segment of the final syllable, and also extended to the initial unstressed syllable of the final word. Though final fricatives showed more lengthening in sentence-final position than final-stop closures, no difference was found in the lengthening of the vowels preceding these consonants. The greater lengthening of the final fricative relative to the preceding vowel resulted in C/V ratios which failed to distinguish between the voiceless fricative in non-final position and the voiced fricative in utterance-final position. These results suggest that sentence position is taken into account in the perception of voicing, such that the C/V ratio applicable in non-final position is increased by a factor of two in final position.