Abstract This experiment investigates the role of voice offset time (the durational aspect of preaspiration), closure duration and voice onset time as phonetic carriers of the voiced-voiceless contrast in Lule Sami word-medial stop consonants. Spectrographic measurements were made on speech samples produced by 7 subjects. The subjects belong to two roughly homogeneous dialect groups. For one of the groups, voice offset time provides a reliable phonetic expression of the voicing feature; for the other group, this relationship is less clear-cut. When observed across subjects, stop closure duration is not consistently related to the voiced-voiceless contrast. Finally, the voice onset time parameter is irrelevant to the contrast.