摘要：This paper aims at answering three research questions leading to a more comprehensive contrastive study of Serbian and American English vowels: (1) how common five-vowel systems are cross-linguistically, (2) how symmetrical these appear to be when it comes to the existence of short vowels and their long counterparts, i.e., how phonetic duration is regarded in vowel inventories, and (3) how comparable vowels are and how crowded phonological inventories are in English and Serbian. The typological studies and more recent phonological databases (UPSID), as well as Liljencrants and Lindblom's (1972) Dispersion Theory imply that further partitioning of these two vowel inventories may be necessary.
关键词：vowels; phonetic duration; vowel symmetry; American English; Serbian; dispersion theory
