Volume 66, Issue 4

Inari Saami, an endangered Finno-Ugric language of Northern Finland, is reported to have a three-way surface contrast in consonant length (short, halflong and long). We studied disyllabic words (C)V1CxV2(C) using data from 5 native speakers under two conditions, with short and long preceding vowel, V1, and found support for the claim that Inari Saami has a ternary contrast in consonant length. The three-way length contrast is more robust following a short V1. The duration of V2 correlates negatively with the length of the medial consonant. However, there is one major departure from this pattern. When both V1 and the medial consonant are long, V2 is also longer. This finding supports the idea that disyllables of this class differ from the others in their prosodic structure in having two metrical feet rather than one. This interpretation tallies with independent evidence from synchronic morphophonology and the historical development of the prosodic system of Inari Saami.

Recent studies of speech perception have shown that speakers retain significant amounts of the phonetic detail of heard speech providing strong evidence for an exemplar-based model of the representation of speech sounds. This does not preclude the existence of a feature-based model as well; indeed many theories of speech perception advocate a feature- or contrast-based model for the discrimination of speech sounds. In this study, we provide evidence that an exemplar-based model of speech perception makes more accurate predictions for the performance of English, French and Turkish speakers in a vowel discrimination task. Participants were asked to discriminate the four high front vowels of German, which differ by both the rounding and tense/lax contrasts. Crucially, English has only the tense/lax contrast, while Turkish and French have only rounding. The results show that having one of the vowels in one’s language facilitates discrimination more than having the featural contrast supporting an exemplar-based model. Furthermore, different discrimination tasks were used showing that the effects of native language on vowel discrimination are mediated by task and by psychoacoustic similarity.