Vowel pronunciation in open syllables in spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch: Exploring a phonological constraint in a listening task

Abstract

According to the Bimoraic Constraint (Kager 1989) and the Minimal Rhyme Constraint (Booij 1995), Dutch syllables by default end in either a tense vowel or a lax vowel followed by a consonant. Syllables ending in a lax vowel do not meet the phonological requirements of a felicitous syllable. The present paper reports on a listening task in which this phonological constraint is explored. Three linguists were asked to categorize 3984 vowels in open syllables in bisyllabic Dutch words with two full vowels (e.g., globaal [glo'bal] ‘global’, dictee [dɪk'te] ‘dictation’). The source words originated from spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch by 80 Flemish and 80 Dutch teachers of Dutch. The main variables of this study were stress (stressed vs. unstressed syllables), relative position in the word (first vs. second syllable), vowel (/a/-/e/-/i/-/o/) and country (Flanders vs. the Netherlands).

The present study did not find conclusive empirical evidence for the phonological constraint at issue. In other words, it was not unusual for Dutch syllables to end in a lax vowel. As expected, vowels in stressed syllables are labeled as tense more often than their unstressed counterparts. More lax realizations were found in the first syllable than in the second, and Flemish vowels were more often categorized as lax than Dutch vowels. The vowel with the lowest tense-score was /a/.