The VOT of the Hungarian voiceless plosives in careful and spontaneous speech

This paper aims at investigating the acoustic properties of VOTs of the three Hungarian voiceless stops (using the CSL50 device) when appearing in isolation (in syllables and in words) but also when occurring in spontaneous speech (5 female teachers served as subjects). The results of the acoustic analysis show a clear difference between careful and spontaneous speech. Bilabials and velars are significantly shorter in fluent speech while dentals seem to be unchanged. Therefore, the actual duration of VOT is characteristic of the place of the articulation of stops in spontaneous speech while VOTs of bilabials and dentals do not differ from each other in careful speech. Vowels following the stops influence them more in careful than in spontaneous speech, which can also be explained by the experimentally confirmed phenomenon of the changing quality of the present-day Hungarian vowels into the neutral vowel. Voice onset time is a specific feature of the Hungarian plosive consonants and its values significantly differ from those of most languages in the world.