Perception and production of word-initial long fricatives in Polish

Abstract

The paper provides an analysis of the perception and production of the Polish distinction between long fricative /v:/ and short fricative /v/ in pre-vocalic position. The task involved 27 native speakers of Polish repeating 50 sentences, including the target sentences. The target sentences were minimal pairs with the meaning difference based solely on fricative length. The results showed that the 190-ms mean duration of the long fricatives was well over twice as long as the 71-ms duration of the short fricatives. When duration of the fricative fell below 147 ms, the listener’s ability to discriminate between a short and long fricative was significantly reduced. Fricative length correlated with the duration of the following vowel: 78% of the time, the vowel was longer in the syllable with the long fricative. Indeterminacy about the identification of long fricatives is particularly well marked in these data: 42% of the responses to prompts with long fricatives included a distinctive pitch pattern, a so-called flat hat: a rising F0 in the first syllable, pitch height maintenance, and a drop after the second syllable. In Polish, this pattern indicates that the speaker is paying particular attention to this part of the utterance [Demenko (1999)].