In the production of Swedish, vowel quantity is known to be realized in the vowel, but also affects duration of a postvocalic consonant. The goal of this study is to examine the use of postvocalic consonant duration as a perceptual cue to vowel quantity. Listeners' responses and reaction times were recorded for synthesized materials in which the vowel spectra and duration were kept constant and the postvocalic consonant duration was adjusted. Results show no indication that listeners actively used the duration of a postvocalic consonant to identify vowel quantity. These findings suggest that adjustments in postvocalic consonant duration in Swedish productions may be temporal artifacts of the preceding vowel quantity rather than reflecting linguistically relevant information.
Cite as: Behne, D.M., Czigler, P.E., Sullivan, K.P.H. (1998) Perceived Swedish vowel quantity: effects of postvocalic consonant duration. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 1031, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-467
@inproceedings{behne98_icslp,
author={Dawn M. Behne and Peter E. Czigler and Kirk P. H. Sullivan},
title={{Perceived Swedish vowel quantity: effects of postvocalic consonant duration}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 1031},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-467}
}