Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

grams), with the occasional aid of spectrograms. According to Wolter’s
measurements, preaspiration duration is on average 90 ms in monosyllabic
words (i.e., words with a VC structure) and 85 ms in disyllabic
words (i.e., words with a VCV structure). In clusters (/p t k/ + /l n r t/)
the preaspirations are somewhat shorter, ranging from 67–84 ms depending
on the cluster. And as was mentioned before, no preaspiration occurred
in /ps/ and /ks/ clusters.
Unfortunately, Wolter did not measure the duration of the vowel
preceding the stops. However, he does append to his thesis the entire set
of mingograms for one reading of one subject, an 18-year-old male. Also
appended are 17 spectrograms from two further subjects, 10 from a 21year-old
female and 7 from 22-year-old female. These data only allow a
coarse estimate of the durations, and at times require some educated
guesswork. Nevertheless, to gain some insight into the relationship
between vowel duration and preaspiration duration in this dialect, the approximate
durations of vowel, breathiness, preaspiration and stop closure
in both the mingograms and the spectrograms were measured. No sound
recordings were available, thus no auditory analysis was possible.
Pr duration (ms)
200
160
120
80
40
0
0 40 80 120 160 200 240 280 320 360
VPr duration (ms)
Figure 3-3. Preaspiration duration (Pr) plotted against the combined duration
of vowel and preaspiration (VPr) for a subset of the data in Wolter’s (1966)
study of the Jæren dialect.
The available test words can be divided into three groups, according
to syllable type: VC, VCV and VCCV syllables (e.g., vått ‘wet,’ åtte
‘eight’ and sakne ‘to miss’); 14 VC, 24 VCV, and 12 VCCV words
were analysed, thus a total of 50 words. Figure 3-3 shows preaspiration
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