Abstract
The phonology of vowel quantity in Czech often makes language acquisition difficult for non-native speakers. Incorrect pronunciation not only contributes to a foreign accent but can also lead to misunderstandings during conversation.
The following study focuses on the realization of Czech vowel quantity by L1-German speakers and its perception by Czech listeners. A set of targeted two-syllable words was extracted from recordings of continuous texts read by eight native L1-German speakers.
The extracted words were put in groups of two / three / four, with the words in a group differing only by the length of their vowels (e.g. valy, valí, vály, válí). Out of these words, a perception test of 203 items was created.
The L1-Czech listeners' task was to identify (from four multiple-choice answers) what they heard and to assess how difficult it was to decide between the options. Results of the perception test and acoustic analysis confirmed the assumption that L1-German speakers do have difficulties realizing vowel quantity in two-syllable Czech words.
It emerged that the success rate in realization of vowel quantity by L1-German speakers differed for various structures of short/long vowels, with the quality of vowels playing a role as well.