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...

One characteristic of African American vernacular English (AAVE) is final obstruent devoicing, where the final consonant of a word like rigid is pronounced more like /t/ than /d/. To determine whether this dialect characteristic influences adults' spelling, African American and White college students spelled words such as rigid and ballot, pronounced by either a speaker of their own dialect or ...

Vowel devoicing is a phenomenon that is reported to occur in many languages such as Japanese, Parisian and Montreal French, Turkish and English. This paper investigates vowel devoicing in Korean. A devoiced vowel does not exhibit characteristic vocal tract resonances, and instead is realized as a long interval of aspiration or frication following consonant release, resulting in non-distinct seg...

In Japanese, there is frequent alternation between CV morae and moraic geminate consonants. In this study, we analyzed the phonemic environments of consonant gemination (CG) using the “Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese (CSJ).” The results revealed that the environment in which gemination occurs is, to some extent, parallel to that of vowel devoicing. However, there are two crucial differences. One...