Production and Perception of Dutch Foreign Vowel Duration in English Monosyllabic Words*

It is well known that vowel duration may differ across languages. In foreign language learning these differences may lead to incorrectly produced durations in the target language, since the speaker will be inhibited by his mother tongue. In this paper two experirnents are reported. The fust describes a production test, airned at obtaining a systernatic description of durations of comparable vowels in RP British English and Dutch, as well as English spoken by Dutch foreign leamers. The data show considerable differences in vowel duration between native English, foreign English, and native Dutch. The differences found between native and foreign English were used in a second perception experiment to investigate the relevanee of incorrectly produced vowel durations to the perception of a foreign accent. Results show that native listeners are more sensitive to changes in the speetral composition of the speech signa! than to changes in vowel duration.