Perception of the short vs. long phonological category in Estonian by native and non-native listeners Lya Meister, Einar Meister n Laboratory of Phonetics and Speech Technology, Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia article info Article history: Received 8 June 2010 Received in revised form 17 January 2011 Accepted 24 January 2011 abstract This paper studies the perception of Estonian duration-based phonological oppositions by native Estonians and non-native speakers with Russian-language background. The short/long category boundary was examined by varying the duration of a vowel in three contexts involving isolated vowels (V vs. VV), one-syllable nonsense words (CVC vs. CVVC), and two-syllable real words (CVCV vs. CVVCV). Since vowel duration serves to distinguish lexical minimal pairs in Estonian but not in Russian, L1 and L2 subjects are expected to employ different perceptual strategies in a short/long categorization task. In particular, location and width of category boundaries as well as consistency of categorization are likely to vary between the groups. The results showed that L2 subjects were quite successful in distinguishing the Estonian short/long categories despite the non-categorical use of the duration cue in their native language. As a rule, the L2 subjects demonstrated (1) category boundaries at longer durations, (2) larger width of category boundaries, and (3) lower consistency of responses compared to those of the L1 group. The perceptual strategies of L2 subjects might be based on the continuous auditory perception of the salient duration cue, or on the variable duration patterns associated with word stress in their L1, or on a combination of both strategies. & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Different languages exploit duration of speech sounds in different ways – in quantity languages duration has a function not available in non-quantity languages, namely to signal quan- tity contrasts. Typical examples of quantity languages are Finnish and Estonian, although Estonian has been claimed to undergo a prosodic change from quantity language to accent language (Lehiste, 2003). In Finnish there is a binary quantity contrast in both vowels and consonants, independent of each other and independent of stress (Suomi, Toivanen, & Ylitalo, 2008). The Finnish quantity contrast is best interpreted syntagmatically: contrastively long segments are interpreted as sequences of two identical phonemes, e.g. kato /kato/ ‘dearth’, kaato /kaato/ ‘over- turning’, katto /katto/ ‘roof’ (Karlsson, 1969). Durational contrasts are even more important in Estonian where two types of quantity oppositions can be distinguished: (1) a binary opposition (short vs. long) at the phonemic level, and (2) a ternary opposition on the foot level, traditionally referred to as short (Q1), long (Q2), and overlong (Q3) quantity degrees. For example, Q1 sada /sata/ ‘hundred’, nom.sg.; Q2 saada /saata/ ‘to send’, sg.imperat.; Q3 saada /saa:ta/ ‘to get’; Q1 kala /kala/ ‘fish’, nom.sg.; Q2 kalla /kalla/ ‘arum’, nom.sg.; Q3 kalla /kal:la/ ‘pour’, 2.sg.imperat. For a more detailed account, see Section 1.1. Non-quantity languages do not use the duration cue contras- tively; instead duration has somewhat different functions. For example, in Russian it acts as the main cue for word stress: vowels have a longer duration in stressed syllables than in unstressed ones (Bondarko, 1998). Word stress in Russian is not fixed; it can be on any syllable resulting in different lexical items. When acquiring the phonological system of a language, native speakers of a quantity language learn to master durational varia- tions in order to produce and perceive contrastive phonemic durational oppositions. As duration of speech segments in fluent speech varies to a great extent depending on a number of factors such as speech style, articulation rate, phonetic context and position of a segment in a word and in an utterance, morphological and syntactic as well as paralinguistic factors, the perception of the phonological length of a sound cannot be based on the absolute duration of a segment. Instead, a relative processing mechanism must be involved in perceptual mapping of speech segments into discrete phonological quantity categories, a mechanism that takes into account the plasticity of sound duration in variable contexts and the language-specific categorical representation of quantity. Numerous studies have shown that the native language (L1) affects the acquisition of a second language (L2), thus one can Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/phonetics Journal of Phonetics 0095-4470/$ - see front matter & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2011.01.005 n Corresponding author. Tel.: + 372 6204200; fax: + 372 6204151. E-mail address: einar@ioc.ee (E. Meister). Journal of Phonetics 39 (2011) 212–224