This study investigates the extent to which phonetic voicing is maintained in word-final clusters composed of an underlying voiced stop followed by nonsyllabic /l/ or /r/ in Majorcan Catalan. Electropalatographic and acoustic data for five speakers of this Catalan dialect reveal that, in agreement with the non-syllabic status of the liquid, voicing for /l/ is only available if occurring during ...

Three experiments, in which Japanese listeners detected Japanese words embedded in nonsense sequences, examined the perceptual consequences of vowel devoicing in that language. Since vowelless sequences disrupt speech segmentation [Norris et al. (1997). Cognit. Psychol. 34, 191-243], devoicing is potentially problematic for perception. Words in initial position in nonsense sequences were detect...

In Tokyo Japanese, /u/ is typically devoiced between two voiceless consonants. Whether the lingual vowel gesture is influenced by devoicing or present at all in devoiced vowels remains an open debate, largely because relevant articulatory data has not been available. We report ElectroMagnetic Articulography (EMA) data that addresses this question. We analyzed both the trajectory of the tongue d...

Conversational fillers (CFs), commonly transcribed as uh, um, or er, typically start with a schwa-like vowel, and signal multiple social, interactive, meta-cognitive, and pragmatic functions. They also co-occur with prosodic boundaries, increase saliency of inter-word disjunctures, and participate thus in coding the prosodic structure. Contrary to these functions, CFs are assumed not to partici...

A wide range of modern Arabic dialects exhibit devoicing in pre-pausal (utterance-final) position. These include Cairene [20], Gulf Arabic, San’ani [8], [18], Manaxah [19], Central Highland Yemeni dialects [1], Rijal Alma‘ (Asiri p.c.), Central Sudanese (Dickins p.c.), Çukurova [15], Kinderib [9], E. Fayyum [2]. In some dialects, pausal devoicing is reported to be accompanied by aspiration (e.g...

This paper argues that phonetic naturalness and unnaturalness can interact within a single grammatical system. In Japanese loanword phonology, only voiced geminates, but not voiced singletons, devoice to dissimilate from another voiced obstruent. The neutralizability difference follows from a ranking which Japanese speakers created on perceptual grounds: IDENT(voi)Sing » IDENT(voi)Gem. On the o...

Final vowel devoicing is a feature of Continental French in which utterance-final vowels lose their voicing and produce fricative-like whistles. Previous studies have examined the phenomenon’s phonological and pragmatic tendencies, revealing its preference for high vowels in open syllables at the ends of statements. Here, we re-examine and expand upon previous work by investigating the role of ...

Mapping word forms onto their corresponding meanings is one of the most complex tasks that young infants acquiring their native language have to perform. This is due to the fact that an utterance can refer to many different aspects of a scene, a problem known as referential ambiguity (Quine 1960). An even more basic problem, though, is that it is not easy to find word forms to start with. In fa...