Olle Engstrand & Diana Krull, ‘Durational correlates of quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-language evidence for a theory of adaptive dispersion’. Phonetica 51, 80-91, 1994.

Abstract

Audio recordings of lively conversational speech produced by 3 Swedish, 4 Finnish and 3 Estonian speakers were analyzed for durational correlates of quantity distinctions. The data suggested that duration contrasts are maintained more consistently by Finnish and Estonian than by Swedish speakers. This is attributed to the unusually complex structure of the Finnish and Estonian quantity systems, and to the fact that Finnish and Estonian, in contrast to Swedish, do not use vowel quality or diphthongization as correlates to quantity distinctions.