Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1979, Page 206

186 Jörgen Pind
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The perception of vowel duration in Icelandic
SUMMARY
This paper reports on an experiment on the perception of vowel duration in Ice-
landic. A cursory examination of the literature dealing with vowel length in Ice-
landic shows clearly that no fixed durations can be assigned to either long or
short vowels. The actual durations are influenced by a large number of factors,
e.g. speaking rate, nature of phonetic environment and number of syllables in the
word. In particular, some measurements reported in this paper (fig. 1) show that
in Icelandic a stressed vowel is shortened as the number of syllables in a word
is increased. This is a well known phenomenon in a number of other European
languages.
This variability (or „elasticity") of speech sound durations poses an interesting
problem for theories of speech perception: How does the listener decide whether
a particular speech sound is phonemically long or short? An experiment is de-
scribed in which 10 Icelandic subjects listened to a series of 1, 2 or 3 syllable
words whose initial vowels had durations ranging from 32 to 160 msec. The
stimuli were constructed from natural speech using a waveform editing program
on a computer. The results of the listening test are shown in fig. 2 (pooled results
from all subjects). There is a significant tendency (p<0.001) for the Iong/short
boundary to move to shorter durations as the number of syllables in the word is
increased. Perception therefore mirrors production. This result is however hardly
compatible with models of speech perception which assume that phonemes (or
syllables) are the basic „units‘“ of speech perception. It is concluded that the
listener perceives the whole word rather than individual segments.