Description:
Finnish has a quantity contrast in both consonants and vowels. It also has primary stress on the word-initial syllable. But, unlike in Czech, there is no neutralization of vowel length in stressed positions, i.e., a stressed syllable may contain either a phonemically short or long vowel. Vowel length is one of the major stress cues in a language like English but obviously in Finnish this use would conflict to some extent with its use in contrasting phonemes. In comparing word structures CVCV, CVVCV, and CVCCV in Finnish it was found that the final vowel in CVCV words was significantly longer than in the other two where the first syllable is long. It would appear as if the effect of the stress were spread over the two syllables in the CVCV words. The same lengthening has been found in an earlier study in normal speech rates in nonemphatic positions. The present study found this effect in both normal and fast speech rates, in two different sentence positions and in three different emphasis conditions.