Durational Variability of Vowel Quantity Boundary for Japanese, Finnish and Czech Speakers in Perception

The discrimination tests were conducted at the word level to study the durational variability of vowel quantity boundary in perception, utilising disyllabic synthetic nonsense words. Four kinds of word structures and five kinds of pitch and intensity variance patterns were used. The number of the tests became 60. 21 Japanese, Finnish and Czech speakers participated in these tests as the subjects. The results showed that the overall durations of the perceptual boundary range was longest in Finnish; the count concentrated in a shorter time in Japanese and Czech than in Finnish; in relation to word structures and prosodic conditions, Finnish took the longest time in all four structures; in the durational ratios within a segment and word, Finnish and Czech showed the similar ratios according to the word structures within a word; the Finnish were influenced most of all the languages by all consonants; CVVCV – CVVCVV affected Finnish and Czech most of all word structures and prosodic conditions.