H. B. Kollia
City Univ. of New York
, and Haskins Labs., 270 Crown St., New Haven, CT 06511
Although Lisker and Abramson (1967) found no effect of the following vowel on the VOT of a stop consonant, Port and Rotunno (1979) found VOT to have greater values for voiceless stops followed by tense than by lax vowels. The purpose of the present study was to obtain a complete database on the VOT characteristics of voiced and voiceless initial stop consonants in Greek, and to examine the contextual effects on the VOT of the post-consonantal vowel, the stress pattern, and the distance of the stress from the initial stop consonant. The question here was whether the vowel effects found by Port and Rotunno for English would be seen in Greek, a language whose two stop categories have voicing lead and medium lag. Speakers read isolated disyllabic and trisyllabic words of four stress patterns. The utterance-initial stops /p, t, k, b, d, g/ were followed by the five vowels of Greek, /(open aye), (eh), i, o, u/. Results indicated that both voicing lead and voicing lag increased for stops followed by higher than by lower vowels. Fourakis (1986) found that stress changes did not affect VOT of /p,t/, only of /k/. In this study, stress variations affected VOT for all stops. Furthermore, these effects were vowel dependent. [Work supported by NIH Grant Nos. DC-00121 and DC-00594 to Haskins Laboratories.]