Document Type : Research Paper
Author
Linguistics Department, Faculty of Literature, Alzahra University, Tehran-Iran
Abstract
This study examines the effect of stress as a prosodic factor and phonetic context as a segmental factor on the Voice Onset Time (VOT) of Persian oral stops and affricates (/b, p, d, t, ɟ, c, ɢ, ʤ, ʧ/). The VOT of these consonants was analyzed in nine different phonetic contexts and under two stress conditions—stressed and unstressed—in 135 Persian words. The phonetic contexts studied included word-initial, inter-vocalic, post-voiceless fricative, post-voiced fricative, post-voiceless stop, post-voiced stop, post-/ɹ/, and pre-/ɹ/. The data were recorded in a controlled laboratory setting by 12 native speakers of Standard Persian and analyzed using Praat software. Statistical analysis of the results was conducted using R software .The findings indicate the significant role of phonetic context in systematic VOT variation. Additionally, the results show that stress had no significant effect on the VOT of voiced stops and affricates, but it was found to be an influencing factor for voiceless stops and affricates. In this case, the VOT of unstressed syllables was shorter than that of stressed syllables. However, in instances where both factors (phonetic context and stress) had an effect, statistical analysis revealed that the impact of phonetic context was far greater than that of stress.
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