SWEDISH ACCENT – DURATION OF POST-VOCALIC CONSONANTS IN NATIVE SWEDES SPEAKING ENGLISH AND GERMAN

Bo Thorén
Dept of Linguistics, Stockholm University

ID 1167
[full paper]

In order to test the persistency of the Swedish complementary durational pattern of VC-sequences in stressed syllables, a number of native Swedish speakers were recorded when pronouncing words in English and German. The words were of a kind that were expected to be perceived by Swedes as having “short vowel”. Swedish speakers pronounced the test words with significantly longer post-vocalic stop consonant /k/ and /t/, than did native English and German speakers, but not when the test word contained a post-vocalic nasal /m/. This asymmetry was not found when native Swedish speakers pronounced Swedish words with the same segments in the VC-sequence. Keywords: foreign accent, temporal patterns, complementary consonant duration.