Suomen pitkien painottomien vokaalien havaitseminen spontaanissa ja luetussa puheessa

Abstract

The difference between long and short vowels and consonants in Finnish is phonologically distinctive, ie. it distinguishes meaning. In spontaneous speech, the difference between short and long vowels is smaller than in read aloud speech (de Silva et al., 2003). In Finnish, the duration of the vowel is the primary cue of quantity for the listener, but tonal differences have also been found in stressed syllables ( Järvikivi et al., 2007). The present study deals with the perception of long vowels in unstressed word final syllables. The research question is whether the vowel’s physical duration influences perception differently in spontaneous speech compared to read aloud speech. Perception tests were carried out in which the test subjects heard modified stimuli. The stimuli were words taken from spontaneous speech and from word lists read aloud by the same person. Internal duration differences in the stimuli were neutralized. Each original word had a long vowel in the last syllable, whose duration was modified into four different variants. Test subjects responded whether they heard a word containing a short or a long vowel. The results reveal that in spontaneous speech a word final vowel does not need to be as long as in read aloud speech to be perceived as long. On average the spontaneous speech stimuli evoked more long vowel responses than the read stimuli. Other factors (such as F0, F1, F2) did not show a clear correlation with responses, although such effects cannot be ruled out based on this study.Keywords: duration, perception, quantity, spontaneous speech, vowel