PROGRESSIVE-UTTERANCE FINAL-LENGTHENING IN SYLLABLES WITH FINAL FRICATIVES

The generality of the pattern of progressively greater lengthening wit hin the utterance-final syllable, previously found with respect to fin al stops, is shown to extend to syllables in Hebrew with final fricati ves. Seven native speakers of Hebrew read matched sentence pairs in wh ich bisyllabic key words appeared in non-final and sentence-final posi tion. Final fricatives showed almost four times as much utterance-fina l lengthening as the preceding stressed vowel. Final lengthening affec ted the duration of each segment of the final syllable, and also exten ded to the initial unstressed syllable of the final word. Though final fricatives showed more lengthening in sentence-final position than fi nal-stop closures, no difference was found in the lengthening of the v owels preceding these consonants. The greater lengthening of the final fricative relative to the preceding vowel resulted in C/V ratios whic h failed to distinguish between the voiceless fricative in non-final p osition and the voiced fricative in utterance-final position. These re sults suggest that sentence position is taken into account in the perc eption of voicing, such that the C/V ratio applicable in non-final pos ition is increased by a factor of two in final position.