Suomi , Kari English Voiceless and Voiced Stops as Produced by Native and Finnish

ABSTRACT It is well known to anyone involved in teaching English to Finnish students that it is difficult for Finns to distinguish between English /ptk/ and /bdg/. This second volume ip a series on a Finnish-English contrastive project reports on a study which attempted to obtain more concrete knowledge about the ability of speakers of Finnish to use the various perceptual cues connected with the voiced-voiceless distinction in English. At this initial stage the linguistic material focused on is necessarily very limited and the conclusions arrived at are valid only with reservations. Similarly, only certain aspects are concentrated on. Chapters 2-4 presents the results of the experiment in acoustic terms. The rest of the report is devoted to an attempt to interpret the results of the experiment in the light of articulatory and other physiological evidence. The latter part of the report is necessarily somewhat more speculative in nature. On the bsis of indirect or second-hand evidence, certain inferences about some aspects of the timing of physiological processes are made. Appendices contain a list of test herds read by informants and sample mingograms. (Author/AM)