Blurb:

This chapter investigates the differences in duration of 3 pairs of phonemically short versus long Hungarian vowels reflecting a vowel quantity contrast, produced by monolingual children from 5 to 7 years of age. We predict differentiation between phonemically short and long vowels produced by Hungarian-speaking children based on quantity and quality as well as more robust vowel differences over time that would become more pronounced in the productions of older children relative to their younger peers. Three groups of monolingual Hungarian-speaking children were selected based on age (5-year-olds, n=14; 6-year-olds, n=14, and 7-year-olds, n=14). Parent and teacher reports indicated no cognitive, speech, language, or hearing disorders in the participants. Audio recorded samples were collected from the children during interactions with the experimenter. Topics included the children’s lives, favorite pastimes, and favorite stories. PRAAT 5.0 (Boersma & Weenink 2015) was used to conduct the acoustic analyses of the target vowels (/i/, /iː/, /o/, /oː/, /u/ and /uː/), measuring the duration of the sound segments.