Research Symposium

BIO

Hyatt Hershberger is a Senior pursuing a Bachelor of Science in General Linguistics. His interests are Slavic languages, phonetics and phonology, and programming. He is presenting research from his Honors in the Major Thesis, which he has worked on for the past year with the guidance and instruction of Dr. Carolina González. Upon graduating, Hyatt plans to pursue a Master's in Data Science at the University of West Florida.

Production of Ukrainian and Russian Syllables

Abstract

The current study aims to study Russian and Ukrainian syllables, in particular, voicing assimilation between consonants in syllable-final and syllable-initial position (for example, in the Ukrainian word просто ['prɔs.tɔ] ‘only’). Voicing refers to the vibration of the vocal folds; in these Slavic languages, adjacent consonants tend to agree in voicing. For example, in Russian the phrase под талией ‘under the waist’ is pronounced [pɔt ˈtalʲɪjɪj] instead of [pɔd ˈtalʲɪjɪj]. Specifically, this study examines the following question:
1) How does voicing assimilation manifest within and between words in Russian and Ukrainian?
In order to answer this research question, I will collect speech data from Native Speakers of Ukrainian and Russian through online databases, such as the Journal of IPA. The data includes recordings of native speakers reading words, phrases, and larger narratives aloud. Utterances containing potential voicing assimilation will be analyzed acoustically via the voice analysis software Praat. Evidence of voicing assimilation will be shown by the contrast, or lack thereof, of voicing between adjacent consonants. This evidence will help determine whether there are phonetic differences between syllable production in Slavic languages.

Keywords: Slavic, Linguistics, Phonology, Phonetics, Acoustics