Distinctive Vowel Length Research Articles

Why are three-level vowel length systems rare? Insights from Dinka (Luanyjang dialect)

This paper deals with the quantity system of Dinka, a Nilo-Saharan language. Andersen [(1987). The phonemic system of Agar Dinka. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, 9, 1–27] has postulated that Dinka has a three-level vowel length distinction, i.e., /V/ vs. /VV/ vs. /VVV/. However, it has been argued that three-level vowel length distinctions may not exist in human language, because they may not be reliably produced and perceived [Kohler, K.J. (2001). Überlänge im Niederdeutschen? In: R. Peters, H. P. Pütz, & U. Weber (Eds.), Vulpis Adolatio—Festschrift für Hubertus Menke zum 60. Geburtstag (pp. 385–402). Heidelberg: C. Winter]. Moreover, Andersen's analysis challenges the widely held view that phonological distinctions are maximally binary (see, e.g. Odden, D. [(1997). Some theoretical issues in Estonian prosody. In: I. Lehiste & J. Ross (Eds.), Estonian prosody: Papers from a symposium (pp. 165–195). Tallinn: Institute of Estonian Language]). In this paper we examine the Dinka quantity system by means of an acoustic analysis. This acoustic analysis reveals that the contrast in question can be accounted for best by the three-level vowel length hypothesis. Also, the realisation of the distinction provides insight as to why three-level vowel length distinctions are uncommon. Our results suggest that the phonetic space for quantity distinctions is limited, so that any increase in categories reduces the phonetic distance between them.

Phonemic Versus Phonetic Correlates of Vowel Length in Chuxnabán Mixe

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Acquisition of Japanese pitch-accent by non-native speakers

Vowel duration and F0 movement in Japanese pitch-accented words produced by non-native speakers were investigated. Phonemic vowel length and pitch accent are two prosodic properties of Japanese that are problematic for language learners. The vowel length distinction is typically realized by durational differences, and pitch accent involves F0 movement from high to low within an accented word. Equal numbers of target words and filler words were produced by 50 speakers by repeating after audio recorded Japanese sentences one at a time. The stimulus sentences were uttered by a native speaker of Tokyo Japanese. Speakers were randomly divided into two groups. For group A, a visual stimulus indicating the native speaker’s pitch contour for the target word appeared right after each audio stimulus. Speakers were instructed to follow the visual stimulus as they produced the target word. No visual stimulus was provided to group B. A sufficient durational distinction between long and short vowels was produced by both groups. However, group B failed to produce adequate amount or direction of F0 movement. These results suggest that explicitly showing pitch contour to language learners improves their pronunciation of pitch accent.

Effects of speaking rate on the vowel length distinction in Japanese

The issue of acoustic invariance was explored with the question of whether an absolute or relative duration value can be found to reliably classify the Japanese phonemic short and long vowels produced across different speaking rates. The stimuli were Japanese disyllabic non-words (Experiment 1) and real words (Experiment 2). Four native speakers produced these words in a carrier sentence at slow, normal, and fast rates. The duration of accented and unaccented short vowels in CV́CV contexts and contrasting long vowels in CV́VCV and CV́CVV contexts, as well as word duration, was measured. Rate changes affected the duration of long vowels more than short vowels in such a way that the duration difference between short and long vowels was greater for slow than normal, and for normal than fast speech. In contrast with the absolute durations, the ratios of long-to-short vowels and three-mora (CV́VCV or CV́CVV) to two-mora (CV́CV) words were less affected by rate changes. Furthermore, the proportion of the vowel to the total word duration was found to distinguish the two vowel length categories across three rates with high accuracy. The results support the view that “relational” acoustic invariance exists that remains stable across speakers and rates.

Perception of the English tense/lax vowel contrast by native speakers of Russian

The present study examined the effect of native language background on the perception of American English tense and lax front unrounded vowels ([i] and [I]). These vowels are distinguishable according to both spectral (vowel quality) and temporal (vowel duration) properties. Nineteen native Russian and 12 native American English listeners identified stimuli from a two-dimensional beat-bit continuum varying in 10 spectral and nine duration steps. English listeners used predominantly spectral quality when identifying these vowels, but also showed some reliance on duration cues. In contrast, Russian listeners failed to employ vowel quality to differentiate English tense and lax vowels which can be explained by their assimilation to the same Russian /i/ phoneme in a ‘‘single category assimilation’’ process (Best, 1995). Instead, they relied almost entirely on the duration cue, despite the absence of distinctive vowel length in Russian. These results could be interpreted as supporting the desensitization hypothesis (Bohn, 1995): When spectral differences are insufficient to distinguish a non-native vowel contrast, duration will be employed by default. Alternatively, the strength of Russian listeners’ reliance on duration may instead reflect the influence of prior experience with subphonemic duration contrasts within the lexical stress system of the Russian language.

Historical Linguistics 1999 (review)

Reviewed by: Historical linguistics 1999 ed. by Laurel J. Brinton Marc Picard Historical linguistics 1999. Ed. by Laurel J. Brinton. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xii, 389. Cloth $105.00. This book contains 23 of the papers that were presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 14), Vancouver, BC, August 1999. These papers, which range in length from 11 to 26 pages, are arranged in alphabetical order by the authors’ names and are followed by an index of languages and language families, an index of names, and an index of subjects. Most of the articles can be roughly divided into those that deal mainly with (morpho)phonology and those that are concerned primarily with (morpho)syntax. In the first category, we find ‘Recent advances in the reconstruction of the Proto-Munda verb’ by Gregory D. S. Anderson and Norman H. Zide, ‘On ablaut and aspect in the history of Aramaic’ by Vit Bubenik, ‘Language change and the phonological lexicon of Korean’ by Young-mee Y. Cho, ‘Distinctive vowel length in Old French: Evidence and implications’ by Randall Gess, and ‘Remains of a submerged continent: Preaspiration in the languages of Northwest Europe’ by Gunnar Ólafur Hansson. Papers in which the languages dealt with are not obvious from the title include Janice M. Aski’s ‘Multivariable reanalysis and phonological split’, which examines the variable outcome of Latin /tj/ and /dj/ in a variety of Tuscan dialects, and Johanna Nichols’s ‘Why “me” and “thee”?’, which looks at the worldwide distribution of these pronouns as well as ‘mama’–‘papa’ lexemes in terms of phonosymbolism. Among the papers that have (morpho)syntax as their major theme, there is ‘How far has far from become grammaticalized?’ by Minoji Akimoto, ‘Are Old English conjunct clauses really verb-final?’ by Kristin Bech, ‘Alternation according to person in Italo-Romance’ by Delia Bentley and Thórhallur Eythórsson, ‘On the origin of the Portuguese inflected infinitive: A new perspective on an enduring debate’ by Ana Maria Martins, ‘Innovation of the indirect reflexive in Old French’ by D.Gary Miller, ‘The English s-genitive: Animacy, topicality, and possessive relationship in a diachronic perspective’ by Anette Rosenbach, ‘Coreference in the Popolocan languages’ by Annette Veerman-Leichsenring, and ‘Atlantis Semitica: Structural contact features in Celtic and English’ by Theo Vennemann. Other languages that are the focus of research in this area are English in David Denison’s ‘Gradience and linguistic change’, Romanian in Maria M. Manoliu’s ‘The conversational factor in language change: From prenominal to postnominal demonstratives’, Mohawk in Marianne Mithun’s ‘Lexical forces shaping the evolution of grammar’, and Vedic in Gregory Stump’s ‘Default inheritance hierarchies and the evolution of inflectional classes’. The four articles that do not fit into these two general categories are ‘Animals and vegetables, Uto-Aztecan noun derivation, semantic classification, and cultural history’ by Karen Dakin, which seeks to establish the direction in which certain borrowed terms were diffused in a number of unrelated Mesoamerican languages; ‘Rapid change among expletive polarity items’ by Jacob Hoeksema, which explores the semantic development of certain collocation relations in Dutch; ‘On the eve of a new paradigm: The current challenges to comparative linguistics in a Kuhnian perspective’ by Marie-Lucie Tarpent, wherein the author speculates on the possible emergence of a new paradigm in historical linguistics to remedy what she sees as its present-day crisis; and ‘Modeling koineization’ by Donald N. Tuten, which argues that this process should not be seen as a ‘mere reduction to a “least common denominator” ’ since it ‘can also lead to the introduction of novel features not found in any of the established contributing dialects’ (325). According to the editor, the selection of these particular articles for publication (less than 15% of the total number of presentations) was ‘intended to display the state of current research in the field of historical linguistics’ (xi). Indeed, a remarkable...

Effects of speaking rate on the vowel length distinction in Japanese nonsense words

This study examined how speaking rate affected the durations of phonemic short and long vowels in Japanese. Four native Japanese speakers produced five triplets of disyllabic nonsense words: CV́CV, CV́VCV, and CV́CVV (C=/m/; V=/i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, and /u/), e.g., /máma/, /má:ma/, and /máma:/. Speakers read these words in a carrier sentence at slow, normal, and fast rates three times each. Durations of accented and unaccented short vowels in CV́CV, and contrasting accented long vowels in CV́VCV and unaccented long vowels in CV́CVV, as well as word durations, were measured from spectrograms. There was a significant amount of overlap between the durations of short and long vowels across the three rates. Rate changes affected the duration of long vowels more than short vowels, showing asymmetry of distribution, consistent with Port et al. [Phonetica 37, 235–252 (1980)]. In contrast with the absolute durations, the ratios of long to short vowels, three-mora (CV́VCV or CV́CVV) to two-mora (CV́CV) words, and vowel (short or long) to word durations were little affected by rate changes. These results are consistent with the view that a relational invariance exists in temporal dimensions of speech [Pickett et al., Phonetica 56, 135–157 (1999)].

Dictionnaire nelemwa-nixumwak francais-anglais (review)

Reviewed by: Dictionnaire nêlêmwa-nixumwak français-anglais (Nouvelle-Calédonie) John Lynch Isabelle Bril . 2000. Dictionnaire nêlêmwa-nixumwak français-anglais (Nouvelle-Calédonie). SELAF No. 383; Langues et Cultures du Pacifique 14. Paris: Peeters. 523 pp. 1680 Belgian Francs (42 Euros), paper. This is the latest in a series of descriptive studies on the languages of New Caledonia, most of which have been produced by linguists working at LACITO in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. The language under study here is spoken by about 1,000 people living on the extreme northwest coast of the New Caledonian mainland. There are two main dialects: Nêlêmwa /nẽlẽmwa/ is the more northerly, spoken in the Poum area; Nixumwak/nixumwak/lies to the south, in the area of Koumac (and it has sometimes been referred to in the earlier literature as Koumac or Kumak). It is bordered to the north and east by Nyelâyu (Ozanne-Rivierre 1998), to the east by Caaàc, and to the east and south by Yuanga (Schooling 1992). Major previous studies on one or other of these dialects include Haudricourt (1963) and Bril (1995). Preliminary sections (7-12) contain acknowedgments, lists of abbreviations, and so on.1 These are followed by an introductory section (13-24) outlining the place of the language within Austronesian, Oceanic, and the New Caledonian family, some background to the current study, and a discussion on kin terms and terms for aspects of social organization. There follows a thorough outline of the phonology (25-46) and a brief grammatical sketch (47-75), themselves useful contributions to the Oceanic literature. Nyelâyu has a complex phonology typical of New Caledonian languages: contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless unaspirated, and prenasalized stops in labiovelar, bilabial, apical, palatal, and velar positions (although the Nixumwak aspirated stops are realized as voiceless fricatives in Nêlêmwa); contrast between voiced and voiceless nasals, lateral and semivowels; seven oral and five nasal vowels; and a phonemic vowel-length distinction. The orthography uses digraphs and trigraphs for complex consonants (e.g., kh for Nixumwak /kh/ and Nêlêmwa /x/, phw for Nixumwak /phw/, etc.); the circumflex accent distinguishes nasal from oral vowels, while vowel length is written by doubling the letter—thus ûû = /ũ:/. Phonological and grammatical differences between the dialects are noted where they occur. The grammar sketch is a brief summary of Bril's (B) Ph.D. dissertation (1995). Like its close relative Nyelâyu (Ozanne-Rivierre 1998, reviewed in OL by Lynch 1999), Nêlêmwa2 is an ergative language: intransitive clauses have the structure [End Page 428] VS, while transitive clauses are VAO or VOA, with agents marked by one of the preposed particles (e)a [+human] or ru [-human]. As in its closer relatives, there are rich systems of deictics and demonstratives, possessive classifiers, and numeral classifiers. There is a bibliography (497-499) and two illustrative texts (501-519) at the end of the book where, following standard French practice, the table of contents is also located (521-527). The bulk of the book is a dictionary of Nêlêmwa: a general Nêlêmwa-French- English list (77-368), followed by two finderlists, French-Nêlêmwa (369-441) and English-Nêlêmwa (443-496). The back-cover blurb states that there are approximately 3,500 entries in the main dictionary, which makes it a substantial one by Pacific standards. The choice of typography and format makes the work quite readable. In the main dictionary, Nêlêmwa items are in bold, with the headword set out slightly to the left and in a larger font than examples within the entry; French definitions and translations are in normal font, English in italic, while grammatical information, cross-referencing, and the like are in a smaller font, usually at the end of the entry. Where forms differ between dialects, these are clearly labelled as P (for Poum, thus Nêlêmwa) or K (for Koumac, thus Nixumwak). Definitions are clear, concise, and yet comprehensive, and there is adequate exemplification of usage, idioms, and so on. (One would always...

Phonemic Vowel Length Contrasts in Cerebellar Disorders

Apraxia of speech and Broca's aphasia both affect voice onset time (VOT) whereas phonemic vowel length distinctions seem to be preserved. Assuming a close cooperation of anterior perisylvian language zones and the cerebellum with respect to speech timing, a similar profile of segment durations must be expected in ataxic dysarthria. In order to test this hypothesis, patients with cerebellar atrophy or cerebellar ischemia were asked to produce sentence utterances including either one of the German lexial items “Rate” (/ra:the/, ‘installment’), “Ratte” (/rathe/, ‘rat’), “Gram” (/gra:m/, ‘grief’), “Gramm” (/gram/, ‘gramm’), “Taten” (/thatn/, ‘actions’), or “Daten” (/datn/, ‘data’). At the acoustic signal, the duration of the target vowels /a/ and /a:/ as well as the VOT of the word-initial alveolar stops /d/ and /t/ were determined. In addition, a master tape comprising the target words from patients and controls in randomized order was played to three listeners for perceptual evaluation. In accordance with a previous study, first, the cerebellar subjects presented with a reduced categorical separation of the VOT of voiced and unvoiced stop consonants. Second, vowel length distinctions were only compromised in case of the minimal pair “Gram”/“Gramm.” In contrast to “Rate”/“Ratte”, production of the former lexical items requires coordination of several orofacial structures. Disruption of vowel length contrasts would, thus, depend upon the complexity of the underlying articulatory pattern.

Timing effects of postvocalic voicing and distinctive vowel length

Syllable-internal timing can be affected by a variety of factors, including postvocalic voicing and distinctive vowel length. Both factors have been found to inversely affect vowel duration and the duration of a postvocalic consonant, resulting in similar rhyme-internal timing patterns. Is there any indication that syllable-internal timing uniquely characterizes distinctive vowel length and postvocalic voicing? Three experiments have been carried out investigating combinations of postvocalic voicing and distinctive vowel length in English, Norwegian, and Swedish. For each language a controlled set of CVCs was selected in which the final consonants were either voiced or voiceless. In addition, Norwegian and Swedish CVCs were selected which had distinctively short or long vowels, and for English, words were chosen which contained inherently short and long vowels. The target items were recorded in carrier sentences and durations of the initial consonant, the vowel, and final consonants were measured. Results demonstrated the expected inverse timing relations within the rhyme associated with postvocalic voicing and distinctive vowel length. In addition, prevocalic consonant duration was consistently distinct for conditions of postvocalic voicing compared to distinctive vowel length. Findings for English, Norwegian, and Swedish will be discussed in terms of syllable-internal timing.

Perception of vowel length in Arabic

This study investigates the acoustic correlates of distinctive vowel length in Arabic, and examines the extent to which these cues might figure in the phonological distinction of vowel length in Arabic. The perceptual experiment determines the accuracy with which vowel duration contrast in spoken Arabic can be auditorily represented. The method was to create sets of stimuli by adding or removing a variable numbers of the excised vowel pitch period in the data selected. These stimuli were presented to native speakers of Arabic in a word identification task. The perceptual accuracy of vowel duration as determined from the slopes of the identification curves revealed that relative vowel duration is the dominant acoustic cue in the phonological distinction of vowel length in Arabic. But spectral cues such as steady-state formant frequency, level of intensity play a significant secondary role in the discrimination of vowel contrast when the relative duration is maximally ambiguous between short versus long vowels. a)Send notice to: P.O. Box 5837, Sharjah, U.A.E.

Effects of speaking rate, focal stress, and distinctive vowel length on syllable-internal timing in Norwegian

The relative timing of consonants and vowels of a syllable can be affected by factors such as speaking rate, focal stress, and distinctive vowel length. Speaking rate and focal stress tend to have a global affect on syllable-internal timing, whereas the effect of distinctive vowel length in Norwegian is generally believed to be localized to the syllable rhyme. When these factors converge on a syllable, the syllable-internal timing simultaneously reflects their concurrent effects. The goal of the present study is to examine and characterize the concurrent effects of speaking rate, focal stress, and distinctive vowel length on syllable-internal timing of C1VC2 components. Conversations were developed in which 12 Norwegian CVCs containing /i, o, a, i:, o:, a:/ were either focused or nonfocused by the discourse. The set of conversations was produced at three speaking rates by native speakers of Norwegian. Results indicate that speaking rate and focal stress have an overall affect on the timing of components in the syllable. In addition, the effects of distinctive vowel length and focal stress on components of the syllable rhyme were found to be interdependent across speaking rates. These findings are discussed in terms of syllable- and rhyme-internal timing.

On the acquisition of rhyme structure in Dutch

In this paper I focus on developmental patterns in the acquisition of rhyme structure in Dutch.1 Rhyme structure in Dutch has several characteristics that children have to learn. First, Dutch syllables can be closed by any consonant except /h/. Second, Dutch has both long and short vowels. Third, the vowel length contrast only exists in closed syllables; in open syllables only long vowels occur. This is captured by the minimal rhyme constraint which states that Dutch rhymes are minimally bipositional (Trommelen 1983, Kager & Zonneveld 1986, Kager 1989, among others). In addition to this language-specific minimal rhyme constraint Dutch rhymes also obey the universal maximal rhyme constraint, which states that rhymes are maximally bipositional (Kaye & Lowenstamm 1981, Kager 1989). However, at the end of words an extra consonant is allowed, which I will refer to as the extrarhymal consonant.2 Word-finally we thus find syllables ending in -VVC and -VCsonCobst.3 Section 1 gives a description of the developmental stages in the acquisition of rhymes. We will see that at the first stage children only produce open syllables, and that vowel length distinctions are not mastered at this stage. Since the vowel length contrast in Dutch only exists in closed syllables, I hypothesise that children first have to acquire final consonants before they can learn the vowel length contrast.4 This hypothesis is confirmed in section 1. However, the matter is slightly more complicated. We will see that when final consonants first appear, they are exclusively realised as obstruents (stage 2). Moreover, I will show that not only are sonorants acquired later (at stage 3), but they also behave differently from obstruents in another respect. Sonorants show a strong relationship with the preceding vowel, while no such relationship exists for obstruents. I will argue in section 2 that obstruents are in the coda; sonorants in the nucleus. I will further show that at stage 3 children begin to represent vowel length in some, but not all environments. I will argue that, since at this stage rhymes are maximal bipositional, reflecting the faxt that the maximal rhyme constraint is important at the early stages of acquisition, the vowel length contrast does not show up before obstruents. Moreover, long vowels never show up before sonorants in the child’s output forms. At stage 4 the vowel length contrast is represented in all environments. I argue that at this stage the extrarhymal position is available in the child’s template. Section 3 summarises the main results and conclusions that can be drawn from them.

Use of vocalic cues to consonant voicing and native language background: the influence of experimental design.

For native speakers of English and several other languages, preceding vocalic duration and F1 offset frequency are two of the cues that convey the stop consonant voicing distinction in word-final position. For speakers learning English as a second language, there are indications that use of vocalic duration, but not F1 offset frequency, may be hindered by a lack of experience with phonemic (i.e., lexical) vowel length (the "phonemic vowel length account": Crowther & Mann, 1992). In this study, native speakers of Arabic, a language that includes a phonemic vowel length distinction, were tested for their use of vocalic duration and F1 offset in production and perception of the English consonant-vowel-consonant forms pod and pot. The phonemic vowel length hypothesis predicts that Arabic speakers should use vocalic duration extensively in production and perception. On the contrary, Experiment 1 revealed that, consistent with Flege and Port's (1981) findings, they produced only slightly (but significantly) longer vocalic segments in their pod tokens. It further indicated that their productions showed a significant variation in F1 offset as a function of final stop voicing. Perceptual sensitivity to vocalic duration and F1 offset as voicing cues was tested in two experiments. In Experiment 2, we employed a factorial combination of these two cues and a finely spaced vocalic duration continuum. Arabic speakers did not appear to be very sensitive to vocalic duration, but they were about as sensitive as native English speakers to F1 offset frequency. In Experiment 3, we employed a one-dimensional continuum of more widely spaced stimuli that varied only vocalic duration. Arabic speakers showed native-English-like sensitivity to vocalic duration. An explanation based on the perceptual anchor theory of context coding (Braida et al., 1984; Macmillan, 1987; Macmillan, Braida, & Goldberg, 1987) and phoneme perception theory (Schouten & Van Hessen, 1992) is offered to reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptual findings. The explanation does not attribute native-English-like voicing perception to the Arabic subjects. The findings in this study call for a modification of the phonemic vowel length hypothesis.

Syllable- and rhyme-internal timing: Combined effects of postvocalic voicing and distinctive vowel length in Norwegian

Syllable-internal timing can be affected by a variety of factors, including distinctive vowel length and postvocalic voicing. Distinctive vowel length, which occurs in Norwegian, and postvocalic voicing have typically been found to inversely affect vowel duration and the closure duration of a postvocalic consonant. When these factors converge on a syllable, syllable-internal timing simultaneously reflects the concurrent influence of distinctive vowel length and postvocalic voicing. Research on English [D. M. Behne and L. C. Nygaard, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 93, 2296(A) (1993)] has shown that when multiple factors concurrently influence syllable-internal timing, their effects occur independent of each other. The goal of the present study is to examine the effects of distinctive vowel length and postvocalic voicing on syllable- and rhyme-internal timing, and characterize the concurrent effect of these factors. A set of 12 Norwegian CVCs containing /i, o, a, i:, o:, a:/ before a final voiced and a final voiceless consonant were produced in context by 12 native speakers of Norwegian. Results indicate that syllable-internal timing is independently affected by distinctive vowel length and postvocalic voicing, however their effects on syllable-internal timing were found to differ. These findings will be discussed in terms of syllable- and rhyme-internal timing.

Effects of speaking rate on the vowel length distinction in Korean

This study investigated the effect of speaking rate on vowel duration in Korean, a language traditionally described as having phonemic vowel length. Results showed that the long and short members of the vowel length contrast were similarly affected across speaking rates, that the durations of short vowels spoken at a slow rate were always longer than short vowels spoken at a fast rate, and that short vowels spoken at a slow rate almost always overlapped in duration with long vowels spoken at a fast rate. These results contrast with findings for temporal dimensions in consonants which show asymmetries between short and long members of the phonetic contrast, with the short member serving as a phonetic anchor. Results also showed that the distinction between short and long vowels emerged less consistently in sentential context than in isolation. Finally, the data suggest that the vowel length distinction is being lost in Korean and is no longer a productive contrast.

Proto-Indo-European circumflex intonation or bisyllabicity?

AbstractThe traditional analysis of PIE thematic case endings (a-stems and o-stems) with long vowels with circumflex intonation as the result of earlier contraction is now widely rejected on the grounds that languages cannot have distinctive intonations on unstressed syllables if they also have distinctive stress and vowel length. Instead of reconstructing long vowels with inherent circumflex intonation, uncontracted pairs of vowels with intervocalic laryngeal will be reconstructed here. This analysis can be applied to the Lithuanian reflexes and several accent-shifts can be discussed in terms of it. The division of Lithuanian into four accentual paradigms can be seen to result from these shifts and Lithuanian accent as an indicator of PIE accentual patterns is accordingly vindicated.

Effects of speaking rate on the vowel length distinction in Korean

Variations in speaking rate affect the perception of temporally defined phonetic distinctions in consonants, such as voicing in stops, and the stop‐glide and stop‐affricate contrasts. The production data on these contrasts show asymmetrical effects on temporally distinctive pairs, with the longer members showing the effects more markedly. These data further suggest that the shorter member of the pair serves as a phonetic anchor. This study investigates whether similar effects emerge for vowels. To this end, production of short‐long vowel pairs was examined across speaking rates in Korean, a language that has phonemic vowel length. Results show that both long and short vowels vary across speaking rates, such that the symmetrical effects found for consonants are not found for vowels. Short vowels do not provide a phonetic anchor: In fact, the durations of short vowels produced at a slow rate nearly always overlap those of long vowels produced at a fast rate. [Work supported by NIH.]

Distinctive vowel length: duration vs. spectrum in Thai

Many languages are described as having a phonological distinction of length in vowels or consonants or even both. If the term is to be taken literally, we would expect to find that the underlying mechanism is control of the relative durations of the articulations for the phonemes in contrast. In languages with short and long vowels, however, it is often observed that short and long counterparts have somewhat different vowel qualities. Previous work on the vowels of Central Thai has shown that relative duration is a sufficient acoustic cue for the length distinction. Since, however, short vowels in portions of the vowel space tend to be more open, we have sought to learn how much of the perceptual burden is borne by relative duration, the major physical correlate of length, and how much by the spectrum (formant pattern), the major physical correlate of vowel quality. We have incrementally lengthened original short vowels and shortened original long vowels in minimal pairs of words embedded in sentences, thus preserving the spectral differences. The stimuli were played to native speakers for identification. The results show that the dominant cue is relative duration; however, for all the vowel pairs, the category boundary is influenced by spectral differences with, perhaps, some effect of the timing of the context as well.

Grammatical Vowel Length and the Classification of Quechua Dialects

0. Introduction.1 Torero (1964:458-61) proposed the existence of phonemic vowel length in Proto-Quechua, based on the occurrence of long vowels in a number of modern Quechua dialects. Long vowels are widely found in Quechua I, one of the two main groups into which Torero divides the Quechua dialects.2 The second main group in Torero's classification, Quechua II, is further subdivided into Quechua IIA, IIB, and IIC. Long vowels occur in several Quechua IIA dialects (Pacaraos, Lincha, Laraos), or indications of their existence at an earlier stage can be found (Ferreinafe). In the remaining Quechua II dialects, including all dialects of the subgroups IIB and IIC, vowellength distinctions are lacking (Torero 1974:22). The question of why no trace of long vowels can be found in such a large number of Quechua dialects, while they occur frequently in others, is still to be answered. Most, but not all, of the long vowels in Quechua I can easily be interpreted as the result of innovations. The remaining cases support Torero's view that vowel length may have been phonemic in Proto-Quechua. In this article I intend to examine two instances of vowel length used for grammatical purposes. I shall argue that both cases are due to innovations, a conclusion which would further reduce the number of occurrences of long vowels to be reconstructed for Proto-Quechua. The cases of vowel length discussed are suffix-final and root-final a: in verb forms, and the indication of the first-person subject or possessor with verbs and