Phonetic correlates of phonological vowel quantity in Yakut read and spontaneous speech

The quantity language Yakut (Sakha) has a binary distinction between short and long vowels. Disyllabic words with short and long vowels in one or both syllables were extracted from spontaneous speech of native Yakut speakers. In addition, a controlled production by a native speaker of disyllabic words with different short and long vowel combinations along with contrastive minimal pairs was recorded in a phonetics laboratory. Acoustic measurements of the vowels' fundamental frequency, duration, and intensity showed a significant consistent lengthening of phonologically long vowels compared to their short counterparts. However, in addition to evident durational differences between long and short quantities, fundamental frequency and intensity also showed effects of quantity. These results allow the interpretation that similarly to other non-tonal quantity languages like Finnish or Estonian, the Yakut vowel quantity opposition is not based exclusively on durational differences. The data furthermore revealed differences in F0 contours between spontaneous and read speech, providing some first indications of utterance-level prosody in Yakut.

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