The Identifiability and Discriminability between Incompletely Neutralized Sounds: Evidence from Russian

This paper examines the identifiability and discriminability of speech sounds in a neutralized position. As in other languages, it is reported that Russian word-final devoicing in Russian is shown to be incomplete in production. In order to examine the perceptual status between incompletely neutralized sounds, both identification and discrimination performance were analyzed and compared. The results revealed that listeners were not only sensitive to slight acoustic differences between the two sounds, but also able to identify them, indicating that voicing neutralization in Russian is incomplete in perception as well. Moreover, the comparison between identifiability and discriminability showed the predominance of the latter over the former.