COMPENSATORY LENGHTHENING IN PERSIAN

It is commonly held that Persian glottal consonants in syllable coda undergo vowel lengthening [8], [9]. Some questions have arisen, however, concerning the phonological operations involved in CL. One view suggests that glottal allophonic weakening is compensated by vowel lengthening. Another view holds that CL involves the deletion of a coda glottal consonant followed by the lengthening of the adjacent nucleus vowel. There is a third view which suggests that CL is a gradient process in which different magnitude of glottal gesture is realized in speech from a weak through complete deletion of glottals. Using the spectral tilt measurements H1-H2 and H1-F1, I suggest that CL involves allophonic reduction of glottal gesture, which is accompanied by lengthening of the preceding vowel as glottals attain a gesture much similar to a vowel. In one experiment, subjects colloquially uttered twenty sentences of which ten sentences were made by CVC words and the other ten by CVCC words containing a glottal consonant in coda position. Results of analysis showed that in addition to significant vowel lengthening for colloquial CVCC, the vowel offset H2, H1-H2 and H1-F1 values significantly changed relative to those for CVC data. This suggests that the codaic glottal gesture in CL data is realized in speech with a lax laryngeal setting that causes more length for the preceding vowel.