Márton Bartók

Word-Initial Irregular Phonation as a Function of Speech Rate and Vowel Quality in Hungarian.

We examined vowel-initial irregular phonation in real words as a function of vowel quality, backness and height, and speech rate in Hungarian. We analyzed two types of irregular phonation: glottalization and glottal stop. We found that open vowels elicited more irregular phonation than mid and close ones, but we found no effect of the backness. The frequency of irregular phonation was lower in fast than in slow speech. Inconsistently with the claims of earlier studies, the relative frequency of glottalization to glottal stops was not influenced by speech rate in general. However, while /i/ was produced with a relatively higher ratio of glottal stops in fast speech, the open vowels showed the widely documented tendency of being realized with relatively less glottal stops under the same conditions.