Voicing Contrast of Intervocalic Plosives in Hungarian

The conflict of articulatory targets may result in neutralization of phonological oppositions, for instance in languages, where prevoiced and nonaspirated voiceless plosives constitute voicing contrast, voicing may be ceased leading to partial or entire devoiced plosives. The question has been arisen by several studies, whether the neutralization is entire regarding the phonetic voicing (type, ratio, duration etc.), and whether and how ―additional‖ features (like vowel duration, consonant duration, vowel voicing etc.) may hold at least partially the contrast of the counterparts. The present study aims to serve some further information on these questions for intervocalic plosives on the basis of Hungarian. Results show that devoicing of [+voice] plosives is not frequent, as expected due to the intervocalic position, however, [-voice] plosives may get partially voiced, therefore partially neutralizing the contrast.