The effects of postvocalic voicing on the duration of high front vowels in Swedish and American English: Developmental data

Abstract

In most languages of the world, a vowel preceding a voiced obstruent is longer than the same vowel preceding a voiceless obstruent. Although the effect of postvocalic voicing on vowel duration is often considered to be phonetically driven, the extent of influence differs considerably across languages. In English, for example, vowels preceding voiced obstruents are nearly twice as long as those preceding voiceless obstruents, whereas in Swedish, the influence is minimal, perhaps because vowel length is phonemically contrastive in this language. The present study examines acquisition data from Swedish and American children, aged 24 and 30 months, to determine developmental patterns of vowel duration associated with context-sensitive voicing. It was hypothesized that the 24-month-old children from both language backgrounds would exhibit the phonetically based tendency for vowels to be significantly longer in the voiced context, but that at 30 months of age, the effects of final consonant voicing would be much stronger in English than in Swedish. Durational measures of high front vowels (tense/long /i/ and its short/lax counterpart) supported the proposed hypothesis. [Work supported by NICHD.]