The acoustics of yer and non-yer vowels [e] and [o] in Slovak

Yers of Slavic languages are vowels that alternate with zero and historically developed from high short lax vowels. In Slovak, both front and back yers were preserved and surface as [e] and [o] respectively. For example, the second [o] in kotol 'cauldron-Nom-Sg' is a yer because it disappears with adding a suffix vowel: kotla 'cauldron-Gen-Sg'. Compare with a non-yer [o] in kostol 'church-Nom-Sg', kostola 'church-Gen-Sg'. Traditional phonological accounts of this difference (e.g. Rubach 1993) assume that yer vowels are underlyingly different from non-yer vowels and merge with [e] and [o] through a phonological process. Therefore, these accounts predict that yer and non-yer vowels should be phonetically identical since they enter the phonetic component already merged as [e] or [o]. The results of our acoustic experiments show that yer vowels are phonetically different from non-yer vowels. The most salient differences were observed in the first formant and duration: yers have lower F1 than non-yers, and for some subjects they are also shorter. This finding supports the view that the phonetic component has access to deep phonological alternations and that phonetics-phonology is a single cognitive system in which the components have different granularities and interact bidirectionally.