Investigating utterance-final vowel reduction in Woleaian

Word-final vowel loss is described as a typical feature of the Micronesian subgroup of Austronesian (Blust 2013), and acoustic reduction of final vowels occurs in all Micronesian languages to some degree (Rehg 1991). Woleaian is one of the few Micronesian languages that retains these vowels, although they reduce in utterance-final position (Mayer 2025). The reduced vowel variants are purported to frequently include silent vowels, a crosslinguistically rare pattern characterized by articulation without an accompanying acoustic signal (Gick et al. 2012). The present study investigates the acoustic and articulatory variation in utterance-final vowels in Woleaian. Participants (n = 6) were recorded producing vowel-final words at the end of carrier sentences, while real-time lip and tongue articulations were tracked using a camera and ultrasound. Target vowel tokens (n = 102) were measured for voicing, intensity, F1, F2, duration, lip pursing, lip lowering, and tongue movement. Results show a wide range of variation in reduced final vowel outcomes. Reduction in quality and/or duration is the most common outcome, followed by devoicing. Silent articulation and vowel deletion occur infrequently (in four and two tokens, respectively, of the present data). The results additionally suggest effects of speaker and word for devoicing and silent vowel articulations.