We investigate the perception of phonemic vowel quantity contrast and its relation to word stress and vowel quality in Slovak, and fill the gap of missing experimental perception data for this language. We observe that both prosodicallydriven undershoot of unstressed vowels and the functional load affect the perception of quantity contrast. Vowel quality plays some role in quantity identification for high vowels (/u/ and unstressed /i/) but Slovak seems to retain a robust quantity contrast for all examined vowel qualities.

Index Terms: vowel duration, Slovak, perception, word stress