Syllable weight and segmental durations in Finnish

At least four factors have been shown to have a reliable effect on segmental durations in Finnish (apart from such global effects as speech tempo and position within the utterance). The best known and most obvious of these factors is the quantity opposition, separately for vowels and consonants (and independently of word stress). Finnish thus has words like taka, taaka, takka, taakka, takaa, taakaa, takkaa, taakkaa; the orthographic double letters stand for double phonemes, i.e. sequences of two identical phonemes. The major source concerning the realization of the quantity opposition is Lehtonen (1970). Where no other are factors are operative, double phonemes have roughly twice the duration of single phonemes. But there are other factors that complicate the durational patterns. A second factor affecting segment durations is lengthening of the word’s second mora, if this segment is voiced (i.e., a vowel or a resonant). For example, Suomi & Ylitalo (in press) observed that the duration of C2 was 68 % longer in the structure CVC2.CV than in the structure CV.C2V. A third factor is word stress. Stress in Finnish is invariably associated with the word-initial syllable, but it is aligned with the word-initial two-mora domain, to use Ladd’s (1996) distinction. Segments have about 30 % longer duration within the word-initial two-mora domain than elsewhere, see Suomi & Ylitalo (in press). A fourth factor is accentuation: a strong, contrastive (sentence) accent on a word increases segmental durations within the word on average by 28 % in comparison to a weaker, thematic accent or lack of accent, see Suomi, Toivanen & Ylitalo (2003); however, in this latter study the disyllabic words investigated constituted a foot each, and thus it remains unclear whether the proper domain of the lengthening is the word or the foot. These latter three factors are separate albeit not completely orthogonal factors, thus stress and strong accent lengthen especially the word’s second mora, but also other relevant segments.