Syllable nucleus duration as a signal of foreign accent by L2 Russian speakers of Czech

The bachelor thesis 'Syllable nucleus duration as a signal of foreign accent by L2 Rus- sian speakers of Czech' focuses on realization of word accent in the Czech speeches of Russian native speakers. Through comparison of the duration values of syllable nuclei in selected words among Czech and Russian speakers, we tried to find a possible link between the vowel duration and perception of the Russian realization of accent as a marked one. This thesis consists of a theoretical and a practical part. In the theoretical part, which has been worked out on the basis of the professional literature studied, we deal with factors affecting the syllable accent and function of vowel duration in Russian and Czech. The practical part is de- voted to analysis of audio recordings, which comprises selection of words for instrumental analysis, manual segmentation of phones in selected words and processing of data on vowel duration. Based on the results obtained, we further compared the duration of vowels among Czech vs. Russian speakers, depending on position of the vowel in a word, phonological length of the vowels and the syllable accent. The realization of selected words among Russian speakers was confronted with the results of a perceptual test. Analysis of the audio recordings showed that the syllable nucleus..