A computer editing technique was used to remove varying amounts of voicing from the syllable-final closure intervals of naturally produced tokens of /p epsilon b, p epsilon d, p epsilon g, pag, pig, pug/. Vowels for all six syllables were approximately the same duration, and the final release bursts were retained. Identification results showed that voiceless responses tended to occur in relativ...

The use of two markers of prosodic finality in French, vowel lengthening and high vowel breathiness/devoicing, were compared among statements and questions of various types (echo-questions, Wh-questions, questions with inverted subject and verb). The comparison focuses on the relation between sentence-final intonation and the other markers of finality. The intonation pattern of statements and W...

Vowel devoicing at phrase boundaries is shown to depend on sentence mode (statement, question) and information structure (non-contrastive vs. contrastive and broad vs. narrow focus), which affect the type of nuclear accent and boundary tone. In li-questions, considerably less devoicing of the vowels before the phrase boundary is found than in other conditions, because the rising boundary contou...

Tswana is traditionally described as having a process of post-nasal stop devoicing (/mba/ → [mpa]). If this description is accurate, then Tswana poses a challenge to views that neutralization processes should be articulatorily grounded. Airflow leakage through the nasal cavity should promote, not inhibit, voicing post-nasally. Zsiga et al. [1] performed an acoustic study of the speech of 6 Tswa...

In this work, we examine a context in which a conflict arises between two roles that infant-directed speech (IDS) plays: making language structure salient and modeling the adult form of a language. Vowel devoicing in fluent adult Japanese creates violations of the canonical Japanese consonant-vowel word structure pattern by systematically devoicing particular vowels, yielding surface consonant ...

This study presents a micro-typological description of German dialects, focusing on the structure 13,492 tokens monosyllables, across 182 locations within Germany. Based data from Phonetischer Atlas der Bundesrepublik Deutschland , systematic geographical differences in both segmental and prosodic organization syllables are explored. The analysis reveals North–South contrast syllable structure....