Audio recordings of lively conversational speech produced by 3 Swedish, 4 Finnish and 3 Estonian speakers were analyzed for durational correlates of quantity distinctions. The data suggest that duration contrasts are maintained more consistently by Finnish and Estonian than by Swedish speakers. This is attributed to the unusually complex structure of the Finnish and Estonian quantity systems, and to the fact that Finnish and Estonian, in contrast to Swedish, do not use vowel quality or diphthongization as correlates to quantity distinctions.
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Engstrand et al. (1994) studied this question.