Diana Krull

Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion

Audio recordings of lively conversational speech produced by 3 Swedish, 4 Finnish and 3 Estonian speakers were analyzed for durational correlates of quantity distinctions. The data suggest that durati

The effect of local speaking rate on the perception of quantity in Estonian.

The Estonian language with its elaborate system of contrasts in quantity, whose essentials are described in the paper, is used to investigate human perception of distinctive contrasts in the duration of vowels, consonants and larger units. In the experiments reported, the speaking rate of a preceding or following syllable was manipulated in addition to that of a target V, C or VC sequence that carried a quantity distinction in disyllabic words. The results confirmed that the second syllable in such words, in particular the duration of its vowel, serves as a reference, but they showed segments of additional syllables to contribute in the same direction. The results provided no support for ascribing quantity to any larger units than phonetic segments. Speech rate effects of similar magnitude have been observed in Japanese, while effects of the same kind were found to be smaller in Dutch. These differences may be linked with the functions durational contrasts have in the different languages. It appears that listeners have to adapt more fully to variations in the local speaking rate when there are no additional cues and the functional load of quantity distinctions is high.

Simplification of phonotactic structures in unscripted Swedish

Informal listening suggests that unscripted Swedish shows a tendency to produce alternating contoid and vocoid articulations which relate to more complex consonant and vowel structures at the phonological level. To test this hypothesis, two unscripted monologues and, for comparison, a careful text reading were analyzed. The speech material was segmented using criteria based on the so-called sonority hierarchy. The results largely corroborated the hypothesis in showing that contoid-vocoid units appeared considerably more frequently in unscripted speech than suggested by conventional phonotactic analysis, and that some reduction effects appeared more frequently in the unscripted than in the read speech. The possibility that this reflects an underlying articulatory organization of spontaneous speech in terms of typologically basic CV units is discussed.