Final devoicing of IV in Reykjavik Icelandic

Icelandic has a phonological process which devoices sonorants after voioed segments in domain-final position, but to date the category of the relevant domain and potential further factors affecting it have not been identified. The present paper studies final devoicing of IV, by which IV is realized as the voiceless lateral fricative [f] in domain-final position. It reports on the results of an experimental reading study designed to test the exact environments of this process and the irnplications for a prosodic hierarchy for Icelandic. The results suggest that devoicing of IV is bound by the prosodic utterance. All instances of IV were devoioed in utterance fmal position. Within the utterance, final devoicing is optional, but the frequency of its application reflects the syntactic and prosodic hierarchy such that it is most frequent at a clause/an IPboundary, significantly Jess frequent at a syntactic XP-edge and it almost never occurs within a syntactic XP.