Phonetic effects of distance in Burmese

This study investigates the phonetic effects of distance from phonological boundaries. Burmese, a Sino-Tibetan language, has a set of words of the shape Cə.Cə.(CV), in which the last syllable is footed, may contain any vowel in the inventory, and carries tone; whereas unfooted syllables contain only the vowel [ə] and do not have lexical tone (Green 1995, 2005). Under a purely phonological interpretation, we may expect all unfooted syllables to be identical in terms of duration and vowel quality. However, Chitoran and Hualde (2007) show that for Romance languages, distance from stress - a phonological entity - can cause significant durational differences between pretonic and pre-pretonic vowels. Similarly, the present study finds that although formant values between prefooted and pre-prefooted vowels in Burmese are not significantly distinct for any speakers - suggesting that vowel quality in all unfooted syllables is similar - distance from the tone-bearing syllable causes significant durational differences for three of five speakers (p < 0.0001). These results suggest that the data can be explained by neither phonological categorality nor phonetic gradience alone, but that both play a role in speech production and that the importance of each varies across speakers.