Mapping boundaries: Microprosodic and dialectal variability in the perception of Estonian long and overlong quantity (DATA)

Abstract

This repository contains the data and code for the paper Lippus, Pärtel, Liis Kask, Sofia Lutter, Nele Põldver, Kairi Kreegipuu. 2025. Mapping boundaries: Microprosodic and dialectal variability in the perception of Estonian long and overlong quantity. – Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat = Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics 21. This paper presents the results of a web-based perception experiment that tested the distinction of long (Q2) and overlong (Q2) quantity degrees in Estonian. Firstly, we observe segmental quality effect on the quantity perception. The stimuli were created from words with 8 different segmental combinations. The second aim of this study is to map the dialectal variability in Estonian quantity perception. There has been some evidence that the listeners from East and South dialect areas are less sensitive to pitch cue than those from North and West. The current study was carried out with 290 participants with various regional background. The results showed that different segmental quality sets have slightly different Q2–Q3 category boundaries. Also, the precision of quantity identification was considerably lower in the case of nonsense word set. Unexpectedly, we were not able to find a clear dialectal background effect.