Browsing by Subject "tahtiajoitteisuus"

Goals: The aim of this study is to examine how Hungarian Finnish language students produce word and sound durations in disyllabic words that consist of one foot. The focus of this study was to find out, do Hungarian speakers produce the foot-based durations the same way Finns do. These are examined from the very beginning of the students’ Finnish studies and changes in vowel durations are investigated both in read and imitated speech. Finnish and Hungarian prosody has been studied quite a lot, but as far as is known this kind of study of durations has not been done before. Methods and materials: This study consisted of speech production experiment, acoustic analysis and statistical analyses. Four students who had only just started their Finnish studies in the beginning of the investigation took part in the experiment. The experiment was repeated similarly three times during fall semester, so that each subject took part in the experiment three times. The speech production experiment had three parts: reading, imitating and reading again. The test material consisted of disyllabic words, both Finnish words and pseudo words, and the word structures were CVCV and CVCCV (where CC was always a geminate). Altogether 3837 words were analyzed in the study. The relative vowel durations were studied statistically using t tests and linear mixed effects model. Results and conclusions: Based on this study, Hungarian subjects produce Finnish foot-based durations very similarly to a native Finnish speaker. Although the statistical analyses showed that there was a significant difference in the relative vowel durations in CVCV and CVCCV words between the Finnish speaker and subjects, overall the vowels behaved the same way in their speech in different word structures. When the initial syllable was light, the second-syllable vowel was longer than when the initial syllable was heavy. In the CVCCV words then the subjects’ relative vowel durations were longer than in CVCV structured words. The examination of the relative vowel durations indicates that Hungarian speakers have an underlying ability to produce Finnish foot-based quantity. A natural subject for further study would be an examination of this phenomena with Hungarian test words, since the foot-based durations has not presumably been studied in Hungarian language. Could it be possible that Hungarian quantity system was foot-timed likewise Estonian and Finnish? Also, examination of the quantity production of other than Finno-Ugric language speakers would be interesting and welcomed topic for future research.