Perception of Finnish long unstressed vowels in spontaneous and read aloud speech
Keywords:
duration, perception, quantity, spontaneous speech, vowelAbstract
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.
