Earlier investigations into variability

The first claims based on replicable instrumental investigations rather than pure introspection were made by Fónagy (1956). He tape-recorded 115 sentences or words spoken by each of ten informants. Fónagy found that shortening was more typical of young informants than old, and more frequent in sentence-initial and sentence-medial position than in final position or in one-word sentences. He pointed out that the extent of shortening varied from word to word, and that most sounds in question were realized as phonetically half-long.
Magdics (1960) replicated and enlarged on Fónagy's study. She tape-recorded Fónagy's 115 sentences spoken by 40 informants. In addition, she recorded one-word utterances spoken by ten 10-year-old children. Magdics' findings corroborate those of Fónagy, but they are somewhat more detailed. For instance, she found that shortening was characteristic of those under 50 years of age.
In a study of the speech of 100 informants in Budapest, Varga (1968: 73-101) found shortening to be a strong tendency, influenced by word-stress, vowel quality, the length of words and emphasis as well as by the age and education of speakers. She also claimed a role for analogy. For instance, if a root with a long vowel (e.g. út 'road') has derivatives with variable vowel length (e.g. utas 'passenger' but úti 'travel' as in 'travel report'), then analogy may result in the shortening of the standard long vowel to yield uti. In a follow-up study a decade later, she found that the shortening of the vowels in question had slowed down (Varga 1979: 479). Dressler and Siptár (1989) also claim that it is easier to shorten a high vowel in a particular form if the length of the vowel varies within the paradigm than if the length is fixed throughout the paradigm. Thus "morphonological shortening in acc. ut+at from nom. út 'way' seems to have initiated a process of lexical diffusion in the whole paradigm of ECH" (Dressler and Siptár 1989: 35).
In a preliminary analysis of data from the Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview, Version Two (cf. Kontra 1995: 11-12), Kassai (1991) investigated vowel length in minimal pairs, word groups, reading passages, and one-word responses to questions in interviews with ten teachers and ten vocational trainees. These informants represent two distinct groups in age (over 50 years of age vs. about 15), socioeconomic status, and language consciousness. The two groups differ in one further respect: teachers are trendsetters and normgivers, while vocational trainees are supposed to be normfollowers. The words and passages were typed with both the old and new keyboards. The interviews were recorded in 1987, at a time when both keyboards were extensively used and personal computers and word processing were practically unknown in Hungary.

Kassai addressed four issues: (1) the effect of tempo on vowel length, (2) the effect of spelling (old vs. new keyboard) on vowel length, (3) the effect of contextual style variation on vowel length, and (4) speakers' consciousness of variation in vowel length. She found that all four variables had an effect on vowel length, but that the effect varied by group, teachers vs. trainees.

Kassai found that fast reading tempo, compared to normal reading tempo, had a shortening effect on long vowels, and that the effect was stronger for teachers than for trainees. At normal reading tempo, however, trainees shortened long vowels nearly twice as frequently as did teachers. The effect of spelling was more marked for trainees than for teachers. Contextual style variation had little effect, but seemed to be more characteristic of teachers than of trainees. A "same or different?" listening test, a "which is correct?" test and a "which do YOU say?" test revealed considerable uncertainty about when the short/long opposition was phonemic, and the trainees were less certain than the teachers. And finally, a word-by-word analysis suggested that variation of vowel length was a feature of individual words rather than individual speakers (Kassai 1991: 78). Kontra (1995) subjected some data transcribed and analyzed by Kassai (1991) to a qualitative reanalysis. Tempo, socio-economic status, and spelling were shown to be potentially significant variables. In addition, it was suggested that phonological position may have a significant effect.