Slavic languages that I have worked on recently include Russian , Bulgarian , and Chakavian . I am currently working on a paper based on a dialect of Macedonian. However, in the case of embedded words, phonetic cues exist which cannot plausibly be tied to a phonemic difference. For example, we have found that the vowels of monosyllabic words are both longer and less undershot than the vowels of similar longer words. Similarly, we have found that in words that begin with an aspirated consonant, the amount of aspiration is higher in monosyllables than in similar longer words.
Preliminary results indicate that they are.
This is taken as support for the idea of abstract underlying representations. This mechanism would predict that recognition of a word with a surface-underlying form mismatch should be more difficult than recongition of a word without such a mismatch. In this respect, phonological rules can be described as generally obeying the dictates of phonetic naturalness. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from the Dihovo dialect of Macedonian, which shows prosodic alignment effects at two different prosodic levels. The first effect is that only vowels and liquids are sonorous enough to fill the position of syllable nucleus.