We investigate the relationship between vowel quantity and
the utilization of formant space in Slovak, and how prosodic
variation in speech rate and lexical stress marking affects this relationship. Slovak presents a common five-vowel system with full phonemic quantity contrast for all vowels in all positions. We found that 1) phonemic quantity contrast in Slovak is salient and minimally affected by lexical stress and speech rate, and 2) shortening due to phonemic contrast and destressing but not due to speech rate, are accompanied by vowel space contraction. We compare the results to the geographically neighboring la
nguages Czech and Hungarian that display similar prosodic characteristics to Slovak
