An Acoustic Study of Vowel Undershoot in a System with Several Degrees of Prominence

The paper presents the results of a pilot study investigating the relationship between vowel quality and duration in Ukrainian. In this language, lexical stress is cued by increased duration; smaller but systematic differences in length occur between unstressed, rhythmic stress-bearing, and pretonic syllables. The presence of several degrees of lengthening within one word makes it possible to test the long-established theories of vowel reduction posing a direct link between decreased duration and vowel undershoot. Overall, the analysis of the aggregated data collected from four native speakers of Ukrainian points to a strong correlation between decreasing duration and the undershoot of F1 targets. However, in separate by-position and by-speaker analyses, no correlation between F1 and duration is observed in the positions of rhythmic and lexical stress. We thus conclude that the stability of the F1 target vis-à-vis temporal parameters may constitute another parameter expressing metrical prominence. In addition, our data suggests that formant undershoot may be affected by an articulatory effort.