Posters

The Long and Short of It: L2 Production of Finnish Geminates

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Abstract

The acquisition of Finnish by L1 speakers of American English is relatively understudied, although the language pairing is of linguistic interest, especially because Finnish contains frequent phonemic geminates (e.g. a /k/ vs. /kk/ contrast), while in English, doubled consonants are not lengthened. Additionally, a mismatch exists between English prosody and Finnish geminates, which appear in contexts where English speakers are not listening for consonant clusters or used to producing them. This work presents a case study of an L1 English speaker, at intermediate level in Finnish, who was recorded reading a word list containing intervocalic minimal pairs and distractors. Her production and a native speaker's (NS) production of the same minimal pairs were measured using Praat to determine how target-like her production was Results show that in 7/8 pairs her geminates were longer than her singletons. However, when it was calculated how much longer her geminates were than her singletons, and compared to NS, the contrasts are mostly not target-like. Her singletons are too long and, in some cases, approach the NS's geminate length. Instructors should not only emphasize lengthening geminates but also shortening singletons for more target-like production. 

Keywords: geminates, Finnish, production

How to Cite:

McGill, J. (2024).  The Long and Short of it: L2 Production of Finnish Geminates. In D. J. Olson, J. L. Sturm, O. Dmitrieva, & J. M. Levis (eds), Proceedings of 14th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, (pp. 1-10). Purdue University, September 2023. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.17595