Abstract The present study uses an acoustic analysis to examine the effects of implicit and explicit pronunciation instruction on acquisition German final devoicing in L2 classroom. Twenty-nine English-speaking learners at a North American university were assigned or condition. Learner speech samples recorded, following pre/post/delayed-post-test design. Four correlates medial obstruent voicing...

Investigation of spontaneous speech corpora has shown that vowel devoicing in Japanese is a statistical phenomena. However, factors behind vowel devoicing have not been fully studied. In addition, there have been no studies that specifically examined pre-pausal vowel devoicing. In this paper, we investigate vowel devoicing in the pre-pausal position, in particular, vowel devoicing occurring at ...

ing away from the fact that languages may choose a final devoicing rule conditioned by a prosodic category higher than the word, Table 10 contains all possible combinations of the relevant (de)voicing parameters. Because of the implicational relation that holds between syllable-final and word-final devoicing, some languages are predicted not to exist. We think these predictions are correct. One...

We examine occurrences of categorical assimilation (neutralizations) in French, the perception of voiced and unvoiced word-final obstruents in different phonological contexts. We first show the categorical nature of the alternation (Exp. 1), supported in Exp. 2 by perceptual categorization data. In Exp. 3, the interpretation of this first percept appears to be corrected in certain contexts, ind...

This paper investigates the perception of non-native phoneme contrasts which exist in the native language, but not in the position tested. Like English, Dutch contrasts voiced and voiceless obstruents. Unlike English, Dutch allows only voiceless obstruents in word-final position. Dutch and English listeners' accuracy on English final voicing contrasts and their use of preceding vowel duration a...

Japanese vowel devoicing was investigated from the viewpoint of perception, an approach which has not been taken in any previous studies. It appears in some dialects of Japanese, including Tokyo dialect. Three tests, a vowel preference test, a same/different test, and an inter-stimulus interval effect test were performed. In the vowel preference tests, 46.3% of devoiced vowel dialects speakers ...

The aim of the current study is to investigate the contextual conditions of devoicing of phonologically voiced stops (bilabial and velar). Articulatory and acoustic data from four male speakers were recorded by means of EMMA and EPG. Devoicing was observed more frequently for the velar stops than for the bilabials. The highest occurrence of devoicing was observed when the voiced stop was follow...

Except for cavity enlargement strategies there is not much consensus about the involvement of supralaryngeal movements in the production of the voicing contrast. In order to study supralaryngeal stop production mechanisms we investigated the kinematics of tongue tip and jaw as well as tongue-palate contact patterns for four German subjects. We took alveolar stops in word medial (Cm) and word fi...

Electroglottographic and acoustic data for Catalan three-consonant clusters composed of a wordand syllable-final C1C2 sequence and an underlyingly voiced C3 in wordand syllable-initial position were collected in order to verify whether a regressive voicing assimilation process operates on all obstruents placed at the C2 and C1 sites. Data reveal the presence of low percentages of vocal fold vib...

The evolution from final obstruents to final glottal stop and then to rhyme glottalization (i.e. from /at/ to /a?/, then to /a'/) is a well-established general trend in the history of the Sino-Tibetan language family and beyond. It has further been shown by laryngoscopy that in three languages which retain the nonreleased syllable-final obstruents /p/, /t/ and /k/ (Standard Thai, and two Chines...