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In order to test the persistency of the Swedish

complementary durational pattern of VCsequences

in stressed syllables, a number of native

Swedish speakers were recorded when

pronouncing words in English and German. The

words were of a kind that were expected to be

perceived by Swedes as having “short vowel”.

Swedish speakers pronounced the test words with

significantly longer post-vocalic stop consonant /k/

and /t/, than did native English and German

speakers, but not when the test word contained a

post-vocalic nasal /m/. This asymmetry was not

found when native Swedish speakers pronounced

Swedish words with the same segments in the VCsequence.