AbstractIt has been long acknowledged that the perception and production of speech is affected by the presence or absence of higher levels of linguistic information, too. The recoverability of meaning heavily relies on semantic context, similarly, the precision of articulation is inversely proportional to the presence of semantic information. The present study explores the recoverability of the voice feature of word-final alveolar fricatives in minimal pairs in Hungarian in phonetic contexts that trigger regressive voicing assimilation. Specifically, it aims to clarify whether the acoustic differences found in earlier studies are perceptually salient enough to distinguish underlying voicing in minimal pairs in semantically ambiguous contexts. For this reason, a perception study with the synthesised minimal pair mész–méz ‘whitewash–honey’ was carried out where the amount of voicing in the fricative, and the duration of the fricative and vowel were manipulated. The target words appeared in the following three phonetic contexts: before /p/, before /b/ and before the vowel /a/. Our results suggest that the observed acoustic differences in most of the cases remain below the perceptual threshold which means that phonological contrast is indeed neutralised before obstruents in Hungarian, and this may cause semantic ambiguity.

中文翻译：

---

最小对中同化语境中声音对比的感知：来自匈牙利语的证据

摘要人们早就认识到，语音的感知和产生也会受到更高层次语言信息的存在或不存在的影响。意义的可恢复性在很大程度上依赖于语义上下文，同样，发音的精确度与语义信息的存在成反比。本研究探讨了在触发回归发声同化的语音上下文中，匈牙利语中最小对的词尾齿槽擦音的语音特征的可恢复性。具体来说，它旨在澄清早期研究中发现的声学差异是否在感知上足够显着，以区分语义模糊上下文中最小对中的潜在发声。为此原因，使用合成的最小对 mész-méz 'whitewash-honey' 进行了感知研究，其中摩擦音中的发声量以及摩擦音和元音的持续时间被操纵。目标词出现在以下三个语音上下文中：在/p/之前、在/b/之前和在元音/a/之前。我们的研究结果表明，在大多数情况下观察到的声学差异仍然低于感知阈值，这意味着在匈牙利语中，语音对比确实在阻塞之前被中和，这可能会导致语义模糊。