Vowel duration contrast in three long-short pairs by Hungarian 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds

Neuberger, Tilda and Bóna, Judit and Markó, Alexandra and Jordanidisz, Ágnes and Bunta, Ferenc (2015) Vowel duration contrast in three long-short pairs by Hungarian 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds. In: ISMBS 2015, 2015. szeptember 7-10., Chania, Crete, Greece.

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Abstract

This study focuses on phonemic vowel quantity differentiation in 3 pairs of short versus long vowels (/i, i:, o, o:, u, u:/) by 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old monolingual Hungarian-speaking children. We hypothesized that there would be vowel quantity and vowel quality differences and also a trend toward greater vowel differentiation as children aged. Method. Participants included 3 groups of monolingual Hungarian-speaking children: 5-year-olds (n=6), 6-year-olds (n=7), and 7-year-olds (n=14) recruited from Hungarian public schools. The participants had typical cognitive skills, speech, language, and hearing within normal limits per parent and teacher report. Audio recordings were collected via conversational samples as the children interacted with an experimenter, discussing favorite pastimes, everyday lives, or favorite stories. Vowels were analyzed using PRAAT 5.0 (Boersma & Weenink, 2015) except final vowels and distorted productions or substitutions. Results. There were statistically significant effects for vowel quality (F (2, 42) = 10.12 at p = 0.000, partial η² = 0.33) and vowel quantity (F (1, 21) = 67.49 at p = 0.000, partial η² = 0.76), but no age effect or age by quantity interaction were found. Our results provided support for our predictions regarding differences based on vowel quantity and quality; however, age and age by quantity interaction effects were not found. Conclusions. Overall, our participants did distinguish vowels based on duration and vowel quality, but those distinctions did not depend on age, possibly indicating that differentiation may occur as early as 5 years of age. Further research is needed to verify our findings using more participants and longitudinal data to track the development of the phonemic contrast between short and long vowels in Hungarian.

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