Browsing by Subject "vokaalien kestot"

In Finnish language there is an opposition between long and short phonemes, so changing the duration of the phone changes the meaning of the word. The purpose of this study was to find out how short and long vowels actualize in the speech of a 2-year-old child and in a speech of an adult in the first syllable of the word. The research question was that is the differentiation between short and long vowels in speech of a child regular and similar to the one in the speech of an adult. For the study I recorded the speech of a 2-year and 5-month-old child and his 29-year-old father as they named object shown in the pictures. First vowels of first syllable of the word was separated from the speech-samples and their duration was measured with Praat-software. Durations of vowels was analysed statistically by comparing both speaker's mean values and standard deviations of short and long phones of every vowel. Child seems to pursue the quantity opposition realized in adult speech, although there is a clearer distinction between durations of short and long vowels in the speech of an adult speaker. Especially short vowels are on average longer in child's speech than in adult's speech, and there is significantly more differences between the mean values of different vowel in the speech of a child. Child also has more deviation in the different variations of the same vowel.