This study investigates phonetic variation of voicing correlates in French obstruents. A controlled set of words was extracted from a large broadcast news corpus providing 378 word-initial singleton obstruents /t, d, k, s/. An expert investigation, by eye and ear, of the productions revealed that phonologically voiced obstruents are phonetically voiced most of the time (96%), while a large numb...

________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Acoustic characterization of phonologically voiced obstruents in Shanghai dialect In Shanghainese, phonologically voiced obstruents in word-initial, accented position are phonetically voiceless and are distinguished from the others (i.e., voiceless and/or aspirated) mainly by a low tone regi...

We examined the glottal opening pattern during devoicing environment in Japanese, with respect to the factors that facilitate or suppress devoicing. The factors include consonantal environment, dialects, speech rate, consecutive devoicing environment and phrase final position. The results indicated that glottal opening patterns are twofold: a single phaseand a double phase opening for /CVC/. On...

In Canadian French, besides periodic phonation, other cues can be associated with the voiced-voiceless distinction due to the application of phonological rules. These cues, mainly duration and vowel quality, may be present in the consonant itself (voiced consonants are shorter than their voiceless counterparts) and in the preceding vowels (duration and vowel quality). The cues are related to th...

Nishimura (2003) first pointed out that in Japanese loanwords, voiced geminates devoice optionally when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent i.e. when they violate OCP(voice) (e.g. /baggu/ → [bakku] ‘bag’). This devoicing of geminates has been used to make several theoretical claims in the recent phonological literature. However, these claims have so far largely been based on intuition-b...

In connection with the phonological distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds in languages, it can be observed that voiced sounds are relatively frequently devoiced, i.e. they are realized phonetically with little or no vocal fold vibration. This study investigated the devoicing of /v/ and /z/ in Standard Southern British English (SSBE) by means of a production experiment in which vocal f...

Previous research shows that Turkish voiced stops and affricates undergo devoicing in word-final position. There are some grammars claiming rhotic [ɾ] is also affected by this phenomenon (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005 Taylan, 2015) as well liquid sonorants ([l] [ʎ]) which can optionally devoicing, at least the Istanbul dialect of (Kornfilt, 1990). This study tests continuant consonants for their ...

The present study investigates the extent of word-final devoicing in Russian for three groups of speakers: monolingual native Russian speakers (4 Ss), native Russian speakers with knowledge of English (7 Ss), and American English learners of Russian (9 Ss). Thirty-four minimal pairs of Russian words differing in the underlying voicing of word-final obstruents were recorded. Acoustic analysis fo...

This paper presents results for voicing maintenance during European Portuguese (EP) stop and fricative production. Results showed that EP presented a high amount of devoicing for all phonologically voiced stops and fricatives. This is in contrast to classical literature reporting high voicing maintenance during stop closure for Romance languages, but confirms our preliminary results from previo...

All Dutch dialects — or, more generally, all West-Germanic dialects except English — display the effects of a process called final devoicing (FD), illustrated in (1) for standard Dutch: an underlyingly voiced obstruent devoices when it occurs at the end of a syllable. That the obstruent is underlyingly voiced can be seen in other morphological contexts, where it does not end the syllable. Thus ...