In this paper I present a novel approach to the phenomenon of length-related “final devoicing” in the Romance varieties of northern Italy. I propose a representational account of the facts, deriving vowel lengthening from the interplay of constraints regulating word-final delaryngealization and weight-by-position constraints targeting only laryngeally specified obstruents. As Repetti (1992) sho...

in this research a number of important and active phonological processes in standard german, spoken in berlin, have been studied. in this regard, four dictionaries: duden universal w?rterbuch (1998), langenscheidt (2002), brock haus (1996), and panbeh-chi (1379) have been used for gathering the data. furthermore, two german informants had a four-hour interview to complete the data. in addition,...

This paper claims that phonology should express the relationship between vowel length and obstruent voicing operationally rather than in parallel. The empirical focus in on Friulian and Milanese. The distribution of vowel length in Friulian is predictable from the underlying laryngeal specification of obstruents. Stressed vowels are long before underlyingly voiced word-final obstruents although...

This paper provides an overview of theoretical and experimental investigations of voiced geminates in Japanese. Active discussion was initiated by Nishimura’s (2003) discovery that in Japanese loanword phonology, voiced geminates can be devoiced, when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent (e.g. /doggu/ → /dokku/). This context-sensitive devoicing of geminates has received much theoretical...

This paper examines German Final Devoicing in OT and shows that a full account of the data requires not only an explanation for Final Devoicing itself, but also a model of the stratification of the lexicon. The point of departure of this study is the observation that although various recently proposed analyses of German Final Devoicing in OT seem to make equally good predictions for the voicing...

This paper examines the interference of L1 neutralization rules in the acquisition of a marked L2 phonological feature. More specifically, it presents results from a study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in English word-final obstruents by native speakers of Catalan. The voicing contrast in final position in Catalan is neutralized by voicing or devoicing rules, depending on the envir...

The present study examines how Swiss German learners cope with the contrast between voiced and unvoiced obstruents in L2 French. The feature [±voice]) is not exploited in Swiss German dialects, where pairs of obstruents sharing the same place and manner of articulation are basically differentiated in terms of longer or shorter duration (i.e., the feature [±tense]). Therefore, we expect that Swi...

This study investigates the realization of stop-fricative sequences across prosodic boundaries in German. According to phonological descriptions of German, voiced fricatives following voiceless obstruents undergo assimilatory devoicing. Results from acoustic analysis show that this process is gradient rather than categorical, and sensitive to prosodic structure, showing a larger extent of assim...

This study investigates the realization of stop-fricative sequences across prosodic boundaries in German. According to phonological descriptions of German, voiced fricatives following voiceless obstruents undergo assimilatory devoicing. Results from acoustic analysis show that this process is gradient rather than categorical, and sensitive to prosodic structure, showing a larger extent of assim...

Certain contextually-predictable phonetic variations have been hypothesized to be due to differing aerodynamic factors: (1) the F0 perturbation on vowels following voiced and voiceless obstruents, (2) the slight differences in Voice Onset Time, and (3) devoicing of back-articulated stops such as [ ]. To test these hypotheses we introduce two techniques that create artificial perturbations in ph...