When "AA" is long but "A" is not short: speakers who distinguish short and long vowels in production do not necessarily encode a short-long contrast in their phonological lexicon.

Kateřina Chládková,Paola Escudero,Silvia C Lipski

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00438

Kateřina Chládková, Paola Escudero + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00438

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Abstract

In some languages (such as Dutch), speakers produce duration differences between vowels, but it is unclear whether they also encode short versus long speech sounds into different phonological categories. To examine whether they have abstract representations for ‘short’ versus ‘long’ contrasts, we assessed Dutch listeners’ perceptual sensitivity to duration in two vowel qualities: [a] and [ɑ], as in the words maan ‘moon’ and man ‘man,’ which are realized with long and short duration respectively. If Dutch represents this phonetic durational difference as a ‘short’–‘long’ contrast in its phonology, duration changes in [a] and [ɑ] should elicit similar neural responses [specifically, the mismatch negativity (MMN)]. However, we found that duration changes evoked larger MMN amplitude for [a] than for [ɑ]. This finding indicates that duration is phonemically relevant for the maan-vowel that is represented as ‘long,’ while it is not phonemically specified for the man-vowel. We argue that speakers who in speech production distinguish a given vowel pair on the basis of duration may not necessarily encode this durational distinction as a binary ‘short’–‘long’ contrast in their phonological lexicon.

Highlights

IntroductionPhonological representations (such as phonemes or phonological features) are stored functional entities of speech sounds
Phonological representations are stored functional entities of speech sounds
The mismatch negativity (MMN) to duration changes was measured in two separate sessions: in one session participants listened to duration changes in [a], while in the other session they listened to duration changes in [A]; the order of the two sessions was counterbalanced across subjects

Summary

Introduction

Phonological representations (such as phonemes or phonological features) are stored functional entities of speech sounds. There are non-quantity languages (such as Greek, Portuguese, or Spanish) that do not encode vowel duration into abstract linguistic categories, which means that phonetically short and long vowels are not realizations of different phonological categories. For some languages it is not clear whether they have abstract phonological categories for vowel length, that is, whether speakers of these languages represent physical duration differences between vowels in terms of a phonological ‘short’–‘long’ contrast. One of such unresolved cases is Dutch

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