Nakai, S., Kunnari, S., Turk, A., Suomi, K. & Ylitalo R. (2009). Utterance-final lengthening and quantity in Northern Finnish. Journal of Phonetics, 37, 29–45.
Presentation: Thomas
Summary: Sarah
This study intends to examine the effect of final lengthening on the preservation of durational contrast in Finnish vowels. In Finnish, duration is phonemically utilized to distinguish between long and short vowels. The authors were particularly interested in whether such a durational distinction would still be preserved in a contrast-threatening condition, i.e., the utterance-final position where final lengthening occurs. To thoroughly investigate this issue, disyllabic words of all possible combinations of long and short vowels were selected as target words, placed in utterance-medial and utterance-final positions. Two durational measurements were taken on vowels – one was based on formants and the other on voicing. Subjects were seven female native speakers of Northern Finnish dialect, who were instructed to read all stimuli with three repetitions. Results showed that in disyllabic words, long vowels generally have greater degree of final lengthening than short vowels, indicating a constraint on final lengthening for the preservation of long-short vowel contrast. Such an effect was further illustrated when accompanying vowels were taken into consideration. Specifically, long vowels were lengthened longer when preceded or followed by short vowels. One further finding related to durational measurement was that while the effect of final lengthening was better shown on formant measurements, voicing was instead used to avoid the confusability between long and short vowels across positions. That is, utterance-medial long vowels were still distinct from utterance-final short vowels in terms of duration in voicing measurements, but not in formant measurements. Given these findings, this study has demonstrated a language-specific constraint on a language-universal phenomenon. In this case, the effect of final lengthening is constrained in Finnish, in which the durational contrast is phonemic.
