Spectral structure and duration of the monophthongs in both contemporary Baltic languages

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ENThe first aim of this pilot-study is to describe and compare typical formant structures and duration of monophthongs in both contemporary Stanthe monophthongs pronounced in zero context (in isolation) are used in this study. This type of production represents natural hyper-articulation (which differs from production of the cardinal vowels); and it is probably the closest to the acoustic and auditory monophthong targets determined by our mental prototypes. The comparison of the spectral structure of the sounds of both contemporary Baltic languages indicates that individual results of each speaker vary to some extent though there always remain certain, quite constant relations: 1) when produced in isolation the long monophthongs in Latvian are distinguished from the short mainly on the basis of their duration/length differences, while quality of Latvian monophthongs in long-short pairs varies very little; 2) in Lithuanian the distinguishing between long and short monophthongs employs both quantitative and qualitative differences. In both languages the relative duration ratio of the isolated Lithuanian and Latvian short monophthongs to corresponding long ones is about 1:2. In all the cases duration differences are statistically significant. The second aim of this study is to check if vowel systems of both Latvian and Lithuanian can be phonologically classified on the basis of the acquired acoustic data. An effective vowel phoneme classification of two different languages has been discussed. According to the theoretical foundations of Lithuanian phonology (Girdenis 2014; cf. LG 1997) the correlation set of distinctive acoustic features of the Lithuanian vowel phonemes (i. e. vowels of uniform articulation) consists of: 1) [tense] (involving the opposition tense vs. lax), 2) [acute] (acute vs. grave), 3) [compact] (compact vs. non-compact), 4) [diffuse] (diffuse vs. non-diffuse).A set of distinctive acoustic features suggested by Gunnar Fant (Fant 1983) has been recently used for the classification of vowels in Standard Latvian (Grigorjevs 2012: 173–176): 1) [grave] (grave vs. non-grave), 2) [flat] (flat vs. nonflat), 3) [extra flat] (extra flat vs. flat), 4) [diffuse] (diffuse vs. non-diffuse), 5) [sharp] (sharp vs. diffuse). Adding of feature [long] (long vs. short) is necessary in this case to make distinction between long and short phonemes. The results of the present study indicate that, if the system suggested by Fant is used to classify both the Lithuanian and the Latvian monophthongs, the quantity feature [long] (in case of Lithuanian incorporating also the feature [tense] involving the differences in quality) has to be utilized as the feature of top priority. If the goal is to design a universal feature system capable of dealing with any vowel system in the World’s languages, the search for appropriate acoustic parameters has to be continued to allow threefold distinguishing in the horizontal and fourfold distinguishing in the vertical dimension. Keywords: contemporary Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian monophthongs, spectral structure, duration, phoneme classification, distinctive feature.