Sound Duration and Place of Articulation

Although duration is one of the most extensively investigated features of speech sounds, there are still many unsolved problems. Various determining factors are insufficiently known, and the explanations given of the better known factors are widely divergent. In a recent article PTBBKE DELATTBE 1 has given a survey of the factors which have been found to influence vowel duration2. He mentions six factors which he supposes to be physiologically conditioned and thus of cross-linguistic validity: The difference shorter /longer vowel is correlated with 1) less open vowel/more open vowel, 2) monophthong/diphthong, 3) surd consonant/sonant consonant, 4) stop consonant/fricative consonant, 5) liquid consonant/solid consonant, 6) oral stop consonant/nasal stop consonant, 7) more front consonant/more back consonant. Of these factors, numbers 1—4 seem to be fairly well established in various languages, whereas 5—7 seem more dubious. The purpose of the present paper3 is to throw some light on the influence of the place of articulation (point 7), in the hope that the results may also be of use for the explanation of other factors. As references for the rule that vowels are relatively short before front consonants, DELATTBE mentions an investigation of English vowel duration by I . L E HISTE and G . PETERSON 4 and an investigation of Spanish and English vowel