Interacting effects of preceding stress and phonemic vowel quantity on consonant duration in Finnish

Abstract

Finnish has a quantity opposition in both vowels and consonants, and demarcative stress on the initial syllable. Stressed vowels are longer than corresponding unstressed ones. A peculiar fact about short and long vowels is that they are significantly longer after a short initial syllable [CV.CV(V)] than after any kind of long initial syllable [CVV.CV(V), CVC.CV(V), CVVC.CV(V)]. A proposed explanation is that duration as a stress cue spills over to the second vowel in CV.CV(V) words in order to avoid neutralizing the phonemic vowel quantity on the first syllable. If this indeed is the source of the second‐vowel lengthening, then we would expect a similar effect in syllable final consonants: The consonant after a short stressed vowel (CVC.) should be longer than the consonant after a long stressed vowel (CVVC.). The duration of geminates was studied in four word structures, CVC.CV(V) and CVVC.CV(V), and they were found to be longer in the former group than in the latter.