The influence of a following consonant on the duration of a tonic vowel in English raises serious linguistic implications. The present paper attempted to study the problem cross‐linguistically using English and Spanish. Readings of word lists in the two languages based on pairs contrasting in terms of voicing revealed that the two languages are qualitatively similar but quantitatively different from the point of view of the duration of a vowel preceding a sonant. The over‐all vowel range of Spanish is considerably less than that of English, and difference in duration related to sonants is also much smaller.