Intrinsic Vowel Duration in Standard Persian

The present article, in the experimental phonetics framework, investigates whether speakers of standard Persian deliberately control the secondary feature of vowel duration correlating with vowel height or if this feature merely results from primary features and therefore can be explained by biomechanical factors. Vowel durational differences among high, mid and low vowels across changes in different speech rates (slow, normal and fast) and in two place of articulations (front and back) were analyzed in standard Persian. The results show that the duration of vowels differing in height is not actively controlled by speakers. These results also shows that durational differences in vowels differing in height cannot be explained by biomechanical factors.