Perceived vowel duration

Two subjects that lie close to Sieb Nooteboom’s professional heart are speech perception and vowel duration, and I am therefore pleased that I can combine these two interests in my contribution to this volume. I am concerned with the difference between acoustic duration and perceived duration, which concepts differ in a similar way to fundamental frequency and pitch. I will claim that vowel height affects perceived duration, in the sense that higher vowels sound longer than lower vowels when acoustic durations are equal. That is, vowel height and perceived duration are positively correlated. In section 2, I present the results of a perception experiment with Dutch listeners which shows this correlation. In sections 3 and 4 I deal with the two main questions that this finding raises. The first concerns the reason for this correlation. I will argue that it is to be sought in a mechanism of compensatory listening, and will cite other cases in the literature that have been given parallel explanations. The second question is whether the correlation is of any significance for the phonetics or phonology of languages. Here, I will argue that it solves a two cases of vowel raising, one phonetic and one phonological, in English and Limburgian Dutch, respectively.