Voicing assimilation at accentual phrase boundaries in Hungarian

The present study investigates the influence of prosodic structure on pre-sonorant voicing in Slovak. Our results demonstrate that prosodic boundaries as well as accent interact in a meaningful way with voicing assimilation. If a major boundary intervenes, the role of accent is eliminated, while in other contexts the presence of contrastive focus induces less voicing. A novel finding of the study is that sonorant consonants and vowels differ considerably in this assimilation process. It is also demonstrated that pre-sonorant voicing in Slovak is categorical but optional and is close to being completely neutralizing