Effects of vowel length and syllable structure on segment duration in Dutch

Abstract

The present study concerns the durational properties of minimal Dutch word pairs containing long and short vowels as a specific case study of the mapping between phonological and phonetic notions of timing. In Experiment 1, duration of the postvocalic stop consonant in CV(:) CSchwa (phonetic symbol)n words did not vary as a function of preceding vowel length. Experiment 2 extended this finding to intervocalic stops in bisyllabic CV(:)CSchwa (phonetic symbol)n words. In Dutch, CV:CSchwa (phonetic symbol)n words contain a long vowel in syllable-final position, while CVCSchwa (phonetic symbol)n words contain a short vowel followed by an arguably ambisyllabic consonant. Results from Experiment 2 indicated that the duration of the intervocalic consonant is not affected by the quantity of the preceding vowel or its differential status as a tautosyllabic or ambisyllabic consonant. An additional finding of Experiment 2 was that the duration of second-syllable [Schwa (phonetic symbol)n] is inversely affected by the length of the vowel in the first syllable. Finally, Experiment 3 established that in CV(:)CCSchwa (phonetic symbol)n words, C2 and, for most speakers, [Schwa (phonetic symbol)n] were longer when preceded by a short vowel in the first syllable. These findings indicate that the presence of a short vowel results in a compensation of approximately 25 ms, which is distributed across the segments following that vowel. It is hypothesized that the postvocalic consonant in Experiments 1 and 2 did not participate in this compensation because the consonant is obligatory following short vowels. Thus, the factor affecting whether or not a postvocalic consonant exhibits compensatory behavior may be not so much ambisyllabicity versus tautosyllabicity but rather its obligatory versus optional status. Implications for models of phonetic and phonological timing are discussed. © 1998 Academic Press.