KVANTITET VOKALA U KOSOVSKO-RESAVSKOM DIJALEKTU: ANALIZA SPONTANOG GOVORA

Abstract

The current paper presents the results of an acoustic analysis pertaining to the duration of vowels in spontaneous speech of 10 male speakers of Kosovo-Resava dialect. Monosyllabic and disyllabic words demonstrating the long and short realizations of stressed vowels were extracted from the spoken corpus. The observed vowels preceded voiceless plosives and fricatives. Besides controlling for the number of syllables, as well as the phonetic context, accent quantity, the position of a word within a sentence, and speech tempo were also taken into consideration. The obtained results substantiate the widely held view that there is a correlation between vowel quality and vowel duration. Namely, the long realization of the low central vowel in our corpus had the longest duration, while the high front vowel proved to be the shortest in the speech of our participants. Also apparent was the speakers’ tendency to produce the short realizations of the mid vowels with a high degree of openness, which then led to a longer duration of the vowels in question. However, such a tendency was not surprising, given that the more open realizations of /e/ and /o/ are, in fact, a characteristic of Kosovo-Resava speech. The smallest quantitative difference was observed for the long and short realizations of the mid vowels /e/ and /o/, while the short/long realizations of the high vowel /i/ exhibited the smallest durational difference.