VOWEL REDUCTION IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
Keywords:
Vowel reduction, English phonetics, Russian phonetics, stress patterns, schwa, formant analysis, phonology, cross-linguistic comparison, speech efficiency, prosody, articulatory simplification, phonotactics, rhythm types, phonemic contrasts, acoustic features.Abstract
This article investigates the phenomenon of vowel reduction in English and Russian, two languages where this process plays a prominent yet distinct role in phonology and prosody. Drawing on cross-linguistic phonetic data, the study explores how stress patterns, syllable structure, and phonotactics shape the realization of reduced vowels in each language. In English, vowel reduction predominantly involves the centralization of unstressed vowels toward the schwa (/ə/), contributing to its rhythmically stress-timed nature. In contrast, Russian exhibits a broader range of reduced vowel outcomes, influenced by the degree of stress and the specific vowel's phonemic identity, aligning with its syllable-timed rhythm and vowel inventory. The paper compares acoustic features such as formant trajectories and duration to reveal shared mechanisms, such as articulatory simplification, alongside language-specific strategies for maintaining phonemic contrasts. These findings illuminate how vowel reduction serves as a linguistic adaptation for optimizing speech efficiency, reflecting both universal tendencies and typological diversity in phonetic and phonological systems.
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