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

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( : ) Cən words did not vary as a function of preceding vowel length. Experiment 2 extended this finding to intervocalic stops in bisyllabic CV( : )Cən words. In Dutch, CV:Cən words contain a long vowel in syllable-final position, while CVCən 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 [ən] is inversely affected by the length of the vowel in the first syllable. Finally, Experiment 3 established that in CV( : )CCən words, C2 and, for most speakers, [ən] 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