This paper reports the results of an EMA study of the typologically unusual ternary quantity distinction of Estonian designed to examine the role of the metrical foot relative to the prosodic word in conditioning articulatory properties. Articulatory measures (formation duration, displacement, and peak velocity) of the three phonemic vowel lengths and the vowel’s neighboring consonants, i.e., the onset consonant of the primary stressed syllable and the onset consonant of the first post-tonic syllable, were taken in words ranging from two to four syllables. Disyllabic and trisyllabic words both contain a single foot but differ in word length, while tetrasyllabic words consist of two disyllabic feet. Our results indicate a robust effect of phonemic quantity on the articulatory duration of the vowel. In addition, interactions were observed between word length and quantity, such that an asymmetry emerged along certain dimensions between two-and four-syllable words, on the one hand, and trisyllabic words, on the other hand. These findings support the view that the foot plays an important role in conditioning articulation in Estonian and that the articulatory signature of quantity does not funda-mentally differ from what is known about the articulation of stress in other languages.