ABSTRACT
The elicitation of vowels that are suited for an acoustic analysis and at the same time depict authentic, natural language use is a challenge; normally, one aspect is afflicted by the other. The overall data for the vowel length study come from thirty-five of the Singaporean children and twenty-one of the English children. Overlaps between the sets and heterogeneity in vowel realizations are lower in the groups from England, though heterogeneity is proportionally stronger for vowel realizations in the GOOSE and FOOT sets. The chapter suggests that a phonemic length contrast between the two lax/tense vowel pairs is maintained by both Chinese and Indian Singaporeans. The quasi-nonexistent differences between the Chinese and Indian Singaporeans in turn render Hypothesis 3b invalid. The former explanation is the more likely one, as the merger has also been reported in the literature on L2 adult SingE, though it is mainly described as a result of a loss of quantitative differences between the vowels.
