Ewelina Wojtkowiak

This paper presents an acoustic study devised to investigate the effects of three presumably distinct prosodic position on the phonetic realisation of Polish front vowels in #CV (that is, following a prosodic boundary and a consonantal onset) and #VC sequences (that is, immediately following a prosodic boundary). The results of the experiment suggest that Polish does not seem to distinguish between utterance-initial and phrase-initial positions, with some contrasts present between these two positions and phrase-medial tokens with respect to F1. No effects of position have been found for F2 or vowel duration. There are also no clear differences on the acoustic realisation of vowels depending on whether or not they are adjacent to the prosodic boundary. These results raise questions about the nature of prosodic structure in Polish as compared to other languages which show more robust effects.

Sandhi-voicing in dialectal Polish affects word-final obstruents in pre-sonorant and pre-vocalic environments. According to the standard descriptions, the process occurs irrespectively of the ‘underlying’ laryngeal specification of the consonant. The process has been problematic for phonological theory, with earlier accounts either requiring ad-hoc mechanisms to allow the ‘spreading’ of [voice], or providing an inadequate explanation of why the process is limited to word boundaries. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that sandhi-voicing dialects is a function of weaker word boundaries in the given dialects. Weaker boundaries go hand in hand with weaker initial syllables. We compare the speech of Standard Polish speakers (N=10) with speakers of the Poznań-Kraków dialect (N=10), who recorded sentences containing obstruent-sonorant sequences spanning word boundaries. We found acoustic evidence of weaker initial syllables for two prosodic parameters in the productions of dialect speakers. The relative strength of word-boundaries is described in the Onset Prominence model (OP; Schwartz 2010 et seq.), which also explains the role of manner of articulation in triggering the process.