Sentence examples for quantity language from inspiring English sources

We show that pitch information affects real-time language processing in a (non-tonal) quantity language.

In what follows, we will scrutinize these assumptions for Finnish, a prototypical quantity language.

To conclude, we showed that speakers of a par excellence prototypical non-tonal quantity language use pitch information in speech perception as a cue to the length opposition.

Finnish is standardly thought of as a prototypical (non-tonal) quantity language, i.e., a language in which durations (of segments) are primarily used to distinguish word meaning [3] [10].

The implication for our purposes would be that speakers of Finnish, considered a prototypical (non-tonal) quantity language, would thus not be expected to be sensitive to these tonal differences.

Furthermore, there is evidence suggesting that our result would apply (at least) to quantity languages more generally [29], [32], [33].

We take our results to suggest that tone and quantity languages may have a common perceptual basis.

This predicts that speakers of non-tonal (quantity) languages might be sensitive to tonal differences in perception.

Discrete phonological phenomena form our conscious experience of language: continuous changes in pitch appear as distinct tones to the speakers of tone languages, whereas the speakers of quantity languages experience duration categorically.

In addition to production data, some evidence suggests that speakers may use this information in the perception of length in quantity languages such as Serbo-Croatian, Estonian, Finnish, and Japanese [7], [29], [32], [33].

This would then be the case for the speakers of languages, such as Finnish, that have quantity, but no tonal system (hence, quantity languages): Whereas they would be sensitive to durational information in lexical perception [15], for them pitch changes would be functional only outside the lexical domain.