Vowel duration before ejective stops

Abstract

It has been well established that vowels are phonetically longer before voiced than voiceless stops, all else being equal. To my knowledge, however, no studies have measured vowel durations before ejective stops. This paper aims to fill this gap: I present preliminary results from a phonetic experiment with nine speakers of Georgian, establishing for the first time that vowels are (i) significantly longer before ejective stops than before voiceless aspirated stops and (ii) significantly shorter before ejective stops than before voiced stops. While the dependent relationship between vowel duration and obstruent voicing is well known, the cause of this relationship is poorly understood. The results presented in this paper shed new light on our understanding of differences in vowel durations and, in doing so, render several proposed explanations for these differences considerably less likely. In particular, my results show that (i) the voice feature itself likely does not affect vowel duration, (ii) closure duration of the following stop is not inversely correlated with vowel duration, and (iii) perceptual factors likely play no role in determining vowel length. My study shows that laryngeal features are the best predictors of vowel duration, suggesting an articulatory connection between these two factors.