Previous research shows that the implementation of obstruent voicing in American English is strongly influenced by adjacent sounds and prosodic factors, but studies mainly focus on words in isolation and carrier phrases. This study examines the voicing of stops and fricatives in phrase-medial position in the connected speech of 37 speakers. Results indicate that stops devoice most often word-in...

The present study is an electropalatographic and acoustic investigation of the fricatives /s, S/ and the affricates /ts, dz, tS, dZ/ based on data from five speakers of Majorcan Catalan and five speakers of Valencian Catalan. Results show that the articulatory characteristics of fricatives and affricates agree in several respects: the sounds traditionally labeled /S/ and /tS, dZ/ are alveolopal...

The developmental properties of vowel devoicing were investigated for 72 children of 4 and 5 years of age, and 37 adults in two dialects of Japanese. One was the Osaka dialect, with a low devoicing rate, and the other the Tokyo dialect, with a high devoicing rate. In the Tokyo dialect, the devoicing rate of children significantly increased and reached an adult-like level by the age of 5 years, ...

Despite Saussure's famous observation that sound-meaning relationships are in principle arbitrary, we now have a substantial body of evidence that sounds themselves can have meanings, patterns often referred to as "sound symbolism". Previous studies have found that particular sounds can be associated with particular meanings, and also with particular static visual shapes. Less well studied is t...

A longitudinal study of one child aged 2;5 documents an invented language game consisting of suffixal reduplication and onset replacement. Initially, reduplication is partial: the reduplicant enlarges in discrete increments over the five stages of the game until by the last stage reduplication is total. Reduplication is accompanied by a process of onset replacement, in which the reduplicant alw...

The conflict of articulatory targets may result in neutralization of phonological oppositions, for instance in languages, where prevoiced and nonaspirated voiceless plosives constitute voicing contrast, voicing may be ceased leading to partial or entire devoiced plosives. The question has been arisen by several studies, whether the neutralization is entire regarding the phonetic voicing (type, ...

This work contributes to the issue of categoricity versus gradiency in natural assimilations. We focused on voice-assimilation in French and started from the assumption that the main cue to obstruent voicing is glottal pulsing. We quantified glottal pulsing continuously with a single acoustic measure — the proportion in duration of voiced portion(s) within a consonant — which we call v-ratio. W...

Abstract The current study is a partial replication of Flege and Port (Language Speech 24(2):125–146, 1981), which examined the production pre-fortis clipping (i.e., vowel shortening before voiceless obstruents) by Saudi L2 English speakers. In addition, it whether language experience operationalized as length residence in an English-speaking country, had any positive effect on 16 speakers were...