High front vowels in Czech: a contrast in quantity or quality?

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the perception and production of Czech / / and / /, a contrast traditionally described as quantitative. First, we show that the spectral difference between the vowels is for many Czechs as strong a cue as (or even stronger than) duration. Second, we test the hypothesis that this shift towards vowel quality as a perceptual cue for this contrast resulted in weakening of the durational differentiation in production. Our measurements confirm this: members of the / /-/ / pair differed in duration much less than those of other short-long pairs. We interpret these findings in terms of Lindblom’s HH the authors concluded that quantity in Hungarian is not as important as it had been considered. Pind [3] found that in Icelandic, for the [ ]-[ ] vowel pair differing in quality (despite the transcription), this quality difference can work as a stronger perceptual cue than duration. The Czech language has five vowel pairs distinguished by phonological length. Traditionally, the long vowels had been described to be approximately twice as long as the short vowels [4]. However, our informal observations suggested that this may not be the case in the / /-/ / pair. This is perhaps because there is also a difference in quality between its members. While this qualitative difference, and therefore an exceptional status of / /-/ / among Czech short-long vowel pairs, has been recognized in literature [5: 33] (even though quite reluctantly by prescriptive linguists) its potential contribution to the contrast has not been meaningfully considered. Recall the finding by Pind about Icelandic cited above. In a subsequent paper [6], Pind tested the hypothesis, based on Lindblom’s