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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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The present article constitutes a study of the raising of overlong mid vowels in the Voru dialect, which is one of the three dialects in the South of Estonia. Long mid vowels of Voru have split into full-long mid vowels (Q2) and into overlong raised mid vowels (Q3). The formant values of raised mid vowels show that they are much higher than mid vowels and very close to high vowels. A perception test was compiled of the words that constitute minimal pairs and contain raised mid vowels or corresponding high vowels. The test showed that it is hard or even impossible for listeners to identify words without a sentence context. The raising of overlong mid vowels has led to the near-merger of them with overlong high vowels.
Bibliographic reference. Teras, Pire (2003): "On the quality change of mid vowels in the Voru dialect of Estonian", In ICPhS-15, 2521-2524.