PERCEPTUAL ACQUISITION OF THE LONG-SHORT DISTINCTION IN THE FALLING ACCENTS OF STANDARD CROATIAN

There are four accent types in the accent system of standard Croatian: long falling, long rising, short falling, and short rising. Acoustic measurements of naturally produced speech have shown that vowel duration ranges from 90 to 140 msec under the short falling accent, and from 170 to 250 msec under the long falling accent. The aim of this study was to determine at what age children learn to distinguish between the two accents. For this purpose a listening test was devised, which consisted of eight tokens of the word pas varying only in vowel duration between 119 and 185 msec, incorporated into the frame sentence Ovo je krasan ... (This is a beautiful ...). Native speakers of Croatian, born and raised in the city of Zagreb, from seven to 21 years of age, were asked to decide whether the sentence meant This is a beautiful dog (short falling accent) or This is a beautiful belt (long falling accent). The results indicate that Zagreb born native speakers of Croatian acquire the long-short distinction between the falling accents between 10.5 and 14.5 years of age, and that the category boundary is set at a vowel duration of about 146 msec.