Krácení vokálu před neznělým konsonantem ve čtené řeči: srovnání českých a rodilých mluvčích angličtiny
Pre-Fortis Shortening in Fluent Read Speech: A Comparison of Czech and Native Speakers Of English

Summary/Abstract: This paper inspects the details of a phenomenon called pre-fortis shortening, the existence of which is widely acknowledged by phoneticians. It occurs in VC sequences where the final consonant is voiceless (fortis). For English, the difference in the duration before fortis and lenis consonants is recognized as a cue of the consonant’s voicing, since the actual voicing tends to be missing. The study compares the extent to which pre-fortis shortening is employed by native speakers of English and by Czech students of English with different degrees of foreign accent. The results suggest that the difference in the duration of pre-fortis and pre-lenis vowels is considerably lower in connected speech than in previously reported results, even in native speakers, with the difference more pronounced in long (tense) vowels.

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