Neutralization or truncation? The perception of two Russian pitch accents on utterance-final syllables

This paper presents the results of a perception experiment that was carried out to verify the hypothesis that in Russian the contrast between pitch accents LH*L and LH* on utterance-final syllables is neutralized. Recordings for the experiment were 10 sets of three short utterances with word stress in the ultimate, penultimate and antepenultimate syllable of the utterance-final word. These utterances were read aloud by four female and four male native speakers. They were asked to realize accents LH*L and LH* in the utterance-final word. After instructions and rehearsing, recordings were made separately for each of the two types. In the perception experiment, 30 native subjects listened to short utterances selected from the recordings and presented in 180 pairs: 120 pairs with ultimate stress and, in order to test whether listeners can hear the difference at all, 60 pairs with penultimate and antepenultimate word stress in utterance-final position. The 180 stimuli pairs consisted of short utterances with realizations of LH*L and LH* on the final word, each pair containing two same or two different types of pitch accent. The task was to compare two stimuli in a pair and to indicate on a score form whether two realizations in a stimulus pair count as passable imitations of each other and thus belong to the same type of pitch accent. The same/different judgments indicate that listeners successfully distinguished between the two pitch accents in the antepenultimate and penultimate conditions, but much less so in the ultimate condition. This suggests that the two accents are truncated in final position, but not neutralized.