Phonetic effects of morphological structure in Indonesian vowel reduction

This study investigates the effects of morphological word structure on closed-syllable vowel reduction in F2xF1 formant frequency space. In particular, it examines whether penultimate vowels followed by morphological boundaries are less apt to undergo mid-centralization than similar vowels in words lacking morphological boundaries. Results are suggestive that some degree of gradient reduction is observable when comparing penultimate vowels in words with different morphological structures, but the existence of several potentially confounding factors require interpretations to be tentative.