Variable quality of liquids in Czech

 

©árka ©imáčková

Palacký University, Olomouc

 

 

The sound substitution described in this study might be considered non-phonological for two reasons. It is an alternation which does not compromise lexical contrastiveness and it is subject to a high degree of both cross-speaker and within-speaker variability.

 

The alternation involves the lateral liquid /l/ in colloquial Czech. The paper looks at variation in the auditory and acoustic quality of /l/ and compares it to the Czech trilled /r/. Both /l/ and /r/ are coronal sounds. Each has a back, dorso-velar, realization but native listeners' evaluations of dark l and dark r differ. In the case of /r/, which is uniformly realized as one-tap trill, the retracted pronunciation (uvulo-velar trill or approximant) is regarded as a defect to be handled by speech-therapists. In the case of /l/, there seems to be a greater tolerance for front-to-back variation.

 

What is interesting about the phenomenon is that variability is evident today where it was not registered by earlier descriptions. It is possible that what we observe in the increased fluctuation of the quality of l is a beginning of a change from phonetic gradience to allophony involving a categorical change.

 

The study documents variation in the resonance patterns of l, showing that it is conditioned by the prosodic structure. The pattern of lowered F2 and raised F1 is associated with non-initial word positions. In addition, auditory evaluation shows that listeners tolerate dark quality of l at the end of a word but not at the beginning.

 

 

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