Continuant Devoicing in Turkish: Reanalysis of Turkish Word-Final Devoicing

Previous research shows that Turkish voiced stops and affricates undergo devoicing in word-final position. There are some grammars claiming rhotic [ɾ] is also affected by this phenomenon (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005 Taylan, 2015) as well liquid sonorants ([l] [ʎ]) which can optionally devoicing, at least the Istanbul dialect of (Kornfilt, 1990). This study tests continuant consonants for their properties different environments. These environments include preceding phonemes voicing qualities, position, sentence-final isolation. Our experiment examines all sounds naturally occur positions ([ɾ], [l], [ɫ], [ʎ], [j], [v], [β], [z], [ʒ]). The involves 10 Turkish-speaking participants from regional backgrounds Turkey. Sets words sentences focusing on target phones were presented to read out loud while recording. findings suggest does extend [+cont] though it variance among participants. phonological process seems be optional unlike stop a systematic process. Another finding, observed Nichols (2016) only, was majority instances where “word-final” occurred, fact exclusively utterance-final Environments considered but not utterance final, yielded mostly fully consonants, showing evidence having own separate set rules than consonants. Overall, analysis suggests an environment (voiced fricatives non-nasal sonorants) reanalyzes previously described similar