pronunciation question about Russian

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Katherine Crosswhite wrote:

> Dear Wayles,
> 
> Thanks for your response.  That is an interesting fact to know about.
> 
> The answer to your question is that this is still somewhat up in the 
> air.  There is evidence on both sides.  All descriptions of CSR written 
> by native-speaker phoneticians working inside Russia say that the 
> neutralization is complete. Some also present formant measurements that 
> seem to confirm that.  I've also looked at formant values for several 
> native speakers, and these vowels do seem to be acoustically [i] (or 
> actually, [I] or something like that).  However, there is at least one 
> formant measurement study (by Jaye Padgett of UC Santa Cruz and Marija 
> Tabain of Macquarie University in Sydney) that found that although 
> unstressed /e/ (or /a/ or /o/) may reduce to an [I] sound, it is not 
> exactly identical to the [I] sound that you get from unstressed 
> underlying /i/.  Furthermore, the differences they found were quite 
> miniscule, so the fact that you've had this experience with your 
> students is quite striking.  One thing I am curious about is the 
> distribution of this phenomenon.  Padgett and Tabain were working with 
> native speakers from Australia.  Do your students typically grow up in 
> Russia then come to the US for college, or have they spent a lot of time 
> is US emigre communities when young?  Are they typically from 
> Moscow/Petersburg or other places?  Enquiring minds...

As I'm sure you know, the real way to find out if they're distinct is to 
have native speakers record tokens of minimal pairs such as mi'la/me'la 
and ask other speakers to guess which is which. Assuming the 
experimental methodology is well-designed, if the listener subjects 
consistently do better than chance, then we have a distinction. Once a 
distinction is proven, the next stage would be to identify the precise 
measurable factors that listeners are using as clues.

Consider, for example, the question of whether schwa and vocalic /r/ in 
American English are distinct. If the linguist measures F1 and F2 and 
finds no difference, that proves nothing, because native listeners 
consistently identify tokens correctly. Only when the linguist thinks to 
measure F3 does s/he realize that the tokens contain distinguishing 
information.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------