Journal articles on the topic 'Final consonant devoicing'

La simplificación de grupos consonánticos en inicial de palabra, palabra medial y posición final de palabra en Inglés se analiza contrastivamente en una muestra de siete adultos costarricenses.Traslado del español se manifiesta en la elección sistemática de epéntesis simplificar inicial de palabra grupos de consonantes, la sustitución y la delación consonante tratar con grupos de palabras mediales y eliminación, y devoicing modificar racimos final de palabra.

The present paper investigates a segmental phenomenon traditionally referred to as word-final obstruent devoicing in Polish. It is generally assumed that the context in which it applies is solely related to the absolute word-final position before silence. By inference, full voicing of a wordfinal obstruent is retained only when (i) it is followed by a voiced segment (a vowel or a consonant) in an utterance or when (ii) it is appended with a suffix which begins with a vowel. In this research a different group of factors which trigger the process is explored, namely the position of the obstruent within the metrical foot. If, as argued by Harris (2009), noninitial position within the foot is a typical lenition site (contrary to Iverson and Salmons 2007) and if devoicing is regarded as a special manifestation of lenition (through information loss, similarly to vowel reduction), a purely segmental (contextual) conditioning for voicing retention in obstruents word-finally cannot be maintained.

This study examined the occurrence of voicing change in English alveolar fricatives produced by Brazilian-Portuguese (BP) speakers in different phonological contexts. The participants were 23 native speakers of BP and 4 native speakers of American English, and all of them recorded 54 English sentences containing the target sounds. The results showed that the phonological context that triggered higher rates for devoicing with /z/ were a pause and a voiceless consonant, and the phonological context that triggered higher rates of voicing with /s/ were a voiced consonant and a vowel. In addition, the presence of the <e> grapheme in word-final position influenced the production of voicing change.

English as spoken as a second language in India (IE) has developed different sound patterns from other varieties of English. While most descriptions of IE have focused on the English of speakers whose first languages belong to the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian families, in this study, I examine the phonetic and phonological characteristics of the English produced by speakers of three Indian L1s from the Tibeto-Burman language family (Angami, Ao, and Mizo). In addition to describing aspects of Tibeto-Burman Indian English, a previously unreported Indian English variety, I also examine how and why this variety of English differs from General Indian English. The English of Tibeto-Burman L1 speakers seems to form a variety distinct from Indian English, most noticeably in terms of the lack of retroflexion of coronal consonants, the devoicing of word-final obstruents, the simplification of consonant clusters, the presence of post-vocalic [p], and the reduced set of vowel contrasts. Most of these can be traced to transfer from the L1 phonology, with the coda devoicing and cluster reductions reflecting simplification in terms of markedness, following developmental sequences found in second language acquisition.

AbstractThe article examines the variable distribution of word-final consonant devoicing (=WFCD) among working-class speakers in the Roubaix district, with respect to phonological conditioning and speaker characteristics. WFCD is shown to affect coronals, labials and velars in that order, and to be favoured by pre-pausal position. Among speakers over forty-five WFCD is primarily associated with female speakers, and to a lesser degree with male speakers under thirty. This sociolinguistically unusual distribution of a strongly vernacular variant may plausibly be attributed to language/dialect contact consequent on the immigration of Flemish-speaking textile workers. Such language contact would have tended to reinforce an already existing characteristic of Picard patois rather than introducing a totally new feature as the brief review of other Picard varie-ties would suggest.

This paper provided the basic information of the phonological processes as the Coda Neutralization and Phonotactics of English Loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). The objectives of this paper were to represent the aspects of the coda neutralization in the sense of voiced obstruent segment becomes voiceless obstruent segment in the final syllable structure of the loanwords, and the consonant clusters break within the insertion of an extraneous segment in any location of the English Loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. In the another framework, this paper revealed the phenomena of devoicing features of coda consonants and the grades of the additional segments in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu loanwords within the principles of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 1993). The central idea of this paper was to explore the process of conflicts between the candidates at the surface level and reflects the properties of the input candidate by the observation of the constraint rankings. In this study, it was propounded the effective formalities of the hierarchy of the constraint rankings and drew one of the best candidates as an optimal candidate out of the output candidates from English loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. The groundwork of this paper was related to the significant aspects of the English loans that were adapted within the addition, insertion, or deletion of the segments in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu. In this paper, it was also determined the facts of the coda devoicing of the speech segments in terms of neutralization at the end of the syllable structure of English loans in Pilibhit Hindi-Urdu.

AbstractThe article focuses on the gradient phonetic effects occurring at the prefix-stem boundary in Polish and their phonological interpretation. The environment of a consonant-final prefix followed by a vowel-initial stem exhibits remarkable variation as to the presence of specific phonetic cues, ranging from their being completely absent or very weak to the presence of strong ones, such as the occurrence of a glottal stop combined with partial devoicing of the prefix-final consonant and full glottalization of the stem-initial vowel. A significant correlation is observed between the number of the phonetic cues marking the morphological boundary and the lexical frequency, as well as certain other factors. The gradient character of the prefix-stem juncture in Polish is independently motivated by the speakers' attitudes as revealed in a psycholinguistic test, which demonstrates that the low-level phonetic features contribute to the mental representation of language grammar. The discussion of the data is conducted in the larger context of Polish sandhi, phonotactics and neighbourhood density effects, providing a functional explanation of the analysed problem and of certain prefix-suffix asymmetries. All the evidence in the article points to the importance of language usage criteria in shaping a language grammar and to the necessity of recognizing this fact in linguistic analysis.

Abstract Although Old English [f] and [v] are represented unambiguously in Older Scots orthography by <f> and <v> (or <u>) in initial and morpheme-internal position, in morpheme-final position <f> and <v>/<u> appear to be used interchangeably for both of these Old English sounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between the spellings and the etymologically expected consonant. This paper explores these spellings using a substantial database of Older Scots texts, which have been grapho-phonologically parsed as part of the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) project. Three explanations are explored for this apparent mismatch: (1) it was a spelling-only change; (2) there was a near merger of /f/ and /v/ in Older Scots; (3) final [v] devoiced in (pre-)Older Scots but this has subsequently been reversed. A close analysis of the data suggests that the Old English phonotactic constraint against final voiced fricatives survived into the pre-Literary Scots period, leading to automatic devoicing of any fricative that appeared in word-final position (a version of Hypothesis 3), and this, interacting with final schwa loss, gave rise to the complex patterns of variation we see in the Older Scots data. Thus, the devoicing of [v] in final position was not just a phonetically natural sound change, but also one driven by a pre-existing phonotactic constraint in the language. This paper provides evidence for the active role of phonotactic constraints in the development of sound changes, suggesting that phonotactic constraints are not necessarily at the mercy of the changes which conflict with them, but can be involved in the direction of sound change themselves.

Purpose The production of speech sound classes in adult language learners is affected by (a) interference between the native language and the target language and (b) speaker variables such as time speaking English. In this article, we demonstrate how phonological process analysis, an approach typically used in child speech, can be used to characterize adult target language phonological learning. Method Sentences produced by 2 adult Japanese English language learners were transcribed and coded for phoneme accuracy and analyzed according to the percent occurrence of phonological processes. The results were interpreted relative to a contrastive analysis between Japanese and English phonetic inventories and developmental norms for monolingual English children. Results In this pilot study, common consonant processes included vocalization, final consonant devoicing, and cluster reduction. These are processes commonly observed in the speech of children who are typically developing. Conclusions The process analysis can inform clinical approaches to pronunciation training in adult English language learners. For example, the cycles approach (Hodson & Paden, 1981) may provide more clinical efficacy than an articulatory approach in which phonemes are targeted individually. In addition, a process analysis can enable clinicians to examine the principles of within-class and across-class generalization in adult pronunciation instruction.

This paper deals with the acoustic features of the Surgut Khanty consonants. The research is based on the data gathered during fieldwork in Kogalym town (2018) and the Ugut village (2019). The audio samples are provided by three native speakers of the Tromjegan, Malyi Yugan, and Bolshoi Yugan idioms. The total size of the sample database numbers more than six thousand isolated consonant pronouncements. The data for the research was obtained using oscillographic and spectrographic methods, formant locus analysis, spectral moment analysis. The analysis was performed via Praat and Emu-SDMS software. Oscillograghy and spectrography methods reveal that voiceless fricative phonemes may be voiced in intervocalic distribution. It is common for the sonants to become devoiced in the final and preconsonantal positions. Moreover, due to devoicing, different phonemes may acquire low-obstruent and obstruent consonant features. For the fricative, lateral-fricative consonants, affricates spectral moment analysis has been carried out. The spectral moments technique gives an opportunity to represent complex noise data as a relatively small set of numbers that can be processed statistically. According to the data on spectral moments, four types of noise have been defined: high-frequency low-dispersion noise resembling /s/, medium-frequency low-dispersion noise resembling /ʃ/, /tʃ/, /cc/, low-frequency medium-dispersed noise for phonemes /ɫ/, / /, low-frequency dispersed noise for phonemes /w/, /γ/. The forman analysis is used o es ima e onsonan resonan frequen ies. As shown by he formant locus analysis, the smallest values of the second formant locus are associated with the labial and velar phonemes. Larger values are associated with the coronal phonemes. The largest ones are specific to the palatal phonemes. At the same time, the acoustic features make it possible to stably distinguish the nasal /n/ - /ɲ/, wherein the opposition of the middle and fron lingual ar i ula ions is observed only in some speakers’ re ordings for the pairs /ɫ/ - / /, /tʃ/ - /cc/.

High Prussian, a variety of East Central German, has a segmentally opaque process of final devoicing: Only some forms with underlyingly voiced obstruents devoice at the end of a word. This phenomenon can also be observed in some morphological alternations where simplex forms show final devoicing but complex ones do not. This paper provides a metrical analysis of final devoicing and two related phenomena: spirantization, and an interaction of vowel length in high vowels and obstruent voicing. It is claimed that nondevoicing items contain disyllabic foot templates and that word-final consonants are then syllabified as onsets of empty-headed word-final syllables. The analysis demonstrates how evidence from West Germanic dialects can contribute to our understanding of the phonology of laryngeal features and to the role that metrical structure can play in shaping phonological alternations.*

The paper reports on the results of a study that aimed to describe the vocalic and consonantal features of the English pronunciation of Macedonian EFL learners as perceived by native speakers of English and to find out whether native speakers who speak different standard variants of English perceive the same segments as non-native. A specially designed computer web application was employed to gather two types of data: a) quantitative (frequency of segment variables and global foreign accent ratings on a 5-point scale), and b) qualitative (open-ended questions). The result analysis points out to three most frequent markers of foreign accent in the English speech of Macedonian EFL learners: final obstruent devoicing, vowel shortening and substitution of English dental fricatives with Macedonian dental plosives. It also reflects additional phonetic aspects poorly explained in the available reference literature such as allophonic distributional differences between the two languages and intonational mismatch.

The paper provides a partial phonological and phonetic description of the segmental structure of L2 Telugu English (TE). Previous research on the subject has been carried out in the context of a more general notion of Indian English (IE), so the properties of TE as distinct from other varieties of IE (e.g., Gujarati English) have largely remained unexplored. We have primarily focused on areas that previous research identified as prominent issues in the study of IE: vowel inventory and production, representation and realization of liquids, word-final obstruent phenomena, and allophones of /w/. To account for these aspects of TE, we have combined a generative approach to the study of an individual’s linguistic competence with linguistic fieldwork as a means of collecting first-hand data. On the basis of collected data, we have conducted a spectrographic analysis of TE vowels and a distributional analysis of TE consonants. The paper provides the first description of the acoustic spaces of TE vowels. We found that all vowels except [?] and [i] are more central in TE than in General American English. /r/ was realized as either [r] or [?] without a specific pattern, and occasionally as [?] in the intervocalic position. /l/ was realized as [?] in word-final position and as [l] elsewhere. TE displayed word-final obstruent devoicing for all obstruents except for /b/, which was consistently unreleased. /w/ was realized as [?] before front vowels and as [w] elsewhere. While previous research that concentrated on the broad notion of Indian English recognized the issue of /w/-allophony, it has not provided a principle that governs the exact distribution of /w/’s allophones. By combining the generative framework with linguistic fieldwork, we have accounted for this long-standing puzzle with a single rule: /w/ ? [?] / __ [–CONS, –BACK].

The problem of identifying phonetic phenomena related to language transfer and correction in second language (L2) production can be approached by conducting broad analyses of the same L2 speaker. This approach is applied in the present study, which investigates errors of pronunciation segmentally (grammatical mistakes, voicing of consonants, and vowel distinctions) and suprasegmentally (intonation and time-gaining techniques) in order to establish the possibility of their being corrected in two recordings of readings by a non-native French speaker. The errors from the first recording were identified, analyzed, and corrected through pronunciation exercises with the aim of raising awareness of the problems to help overcome them on the second reading attempt. The correction methods involved exercises such as reading poetry aloud, pronouncing consonantal segments in various vocalic environments, and reading the target text, syllable by syllable. In addition, the analysis investigates the possibility of phonetic transfer from the two primary languages of the speaker: Bulgarian and English. The researcher is the speaker, the methodological implications of which are discussed, reaching the overall conclusion that it helps to raise awareness of the phonetic background of the errors. Despite the risk of compromising the data through this methodological choice, the results show that a high level of attention and monitoring of the speech alone may be insufficient for internalizing corrections. While grammatical mistakes were corrected most effectively, other segmental and suprasegmental features showed different levels of success. One of the features (the /ɛ/ and /e/ distinction) even exhibited deterioration in the second recording. These examples suggest the presence of “equivalence classification” phenomena and raise the question of the appropriateness of the phonetic exercises for overcoming the errors. Another area of interest was determining the source of errors such as “uptalk”, the reassigning of grammatical gender, word-final devoicing, and elimination of syllable-initial lenis stop prevoicing. Due to the limited amount of data available, it was difficult to draw firm conclusions, but the tendencies observed suggested that the errors might be due to transfer from the speaker’s primary languages, whose influence appeared to be equal. Further research should therefore control for the influence of the two primary languages and extend the scope to include a second post-training recording. Overall, the second recording demonstrated that raised awareness and training helped to achieve acceptable production in the suprasegmental features as well as most of the instances of unfamiliar phones, such as /ʁ/, front-rounded vowels, and nasal vowels.

This paper considers two phenomena in Tz'utujil (Mayan) phonology: final sonorant devoicing and final aspiration of plain (pulmonic) stops and affricates. Both occur word-internally in coda position, as well as word-finally. I present an Optimality-Theoretic (OT) analysis which accounts for both of these phenomena via positional constraints on [spread glottis] ([SG]). This analysis also accounts for attested variation in final aspiration and devoicing across the Mayan language family and predicts an implicational relationship between final nasal devoicing, final sonorant devoicing, and final obstruent aspiration. Final sonorant devoicing is typologically rare and somewhat difficult to explain in terms of phonetic motivation. Tz'utujil may be able to provide insight into the typology of laryngeal features and the roles of contrast and phonetic pressures in phonology.

Morphematic reorientation of German orthography takes place in conformity with a general law in the history of writing. Alphabetic writing systems, being necessarily phonographic, tend to develop towards the encoding of non-phonetic units. The emergence of morphematic elements in German is preceeded by the evolution of word-separation by regular spaces which had been adopted throughout Europe by the end of the 13th century. Based on a corpus containing 157 High German texts (late 15th to late 18th centuries), this paper will demonstrate that morphematic reorientation of German orthography can be explained neither as an invisible-hand-process nor as the outcome of prescriptive grammar, but as the result of interaction between orthograpic norm and usage. Three cases will be considered in detail: (1) Graphic assimilation of allomorphic plosive variation emerges as early as the 12th century, reflecting regional final devoicing. By the early 17th century, the rule governing orthographic reprensentation of final devoicing in present-day German is fully adopted in usage. Its morphematic reinterpretation does not follow before the end of the 17th century. (2) Morphematic graphic representation of [a]-Umlaut emerges during the 14th century in Upper Germany as a phonetic reflex of open [e]. It is recommended by Middle German grammarians since the 1560s, with explicit mention of morphological factors. Around 1700 the writing rule imposes itself in usage. (3) The use of double consonant letters occuring in final positions of 'graphic' syllables ( according to ) rests inhibited until the 18th century, in particular to prevent tri- or tessaragraphs (, ). It is the influence of Adelung's grammar which leads to the final adaption of the present-day rule.

This paper investigates two vowel devoicing processes in Cheyenne, which appear on the surface to be fundamentally different, occurring in distinct segmental and prosodic environments. One process occurs in phrase-final vowels in any segmental environment, while the other occurs only before voiceless consonants in the surface penultimate vowels of some words. The first is consistent with typological expectations and is phonetically grounded, whereas the second is at first glance, neither typologically expected nor phonetically motivated. I provide a unified Stratal Optimality Theory account of these processes, demonstrating that both can, in fact, be treated as cases of domain-final devoicing, and attributed to the same family of positional markedness constraints. Different rankings of the markedness constraints relative to a faithfulness constraint result in different segmental conditions for the two processes. Moreover, I suggest that the two processes may be related via Domain Generalization, whereby a phonetically motivated utterance-final effect phonologizes and extends to smaller prosodic domains. In this way, while the word-level process is not itself phonetically motivated, it can be understood as an extension of another phonetically motivated process in the same language.

Exemplar models of language have proven to be a promising line of research in recent decades, with a number of studies suggesting that such an approach can account for otherwise puzzling facts about language processing and language change (Bybee and McClelland, 2005; Pierrehumbert, 2002). One strand of research in this area explores whether, and how, exemplar models can handle the types of generalizations that are the focus of traditional generative phonology; phenomena such as category formation (Pierrehumbert, 2001) and categorical patterns and contrast across the lexicon (Wedel, 2004) have been successfully modeled in exemplar frameworks. This paper adds to this body of work by exploring positional neutralization, a pattern whose traditional analysis involves a unique underlying form for each word in the lexicon and a categorical rule that eliminates some distinctions among them. I show that it is possible to model positional neutralization – specifically, final devoicing – in an exemplar framework that relies exclusively on surface forms, but that this is possible only under certain conditions.The simulations presented here are similar to those in Wedel (2004) and adopt a fairly standard set of assumptions. The first set of simulations, exemplified by Simulation A in Table 1, implement a basic model with paradigm uniformity and no neutralization. Each simulation consists of a lexicon of ten lemmas, each associated with two cases (‘nominative’ and ‘accusative’), for a total of twenty distinct wordforms. Each wordform has a cloud of up to five exemplars, and is initially seeded with a single randomly generated wordform. All words have the form CVC (nominative) or CVCi (accusative; the ‘suffix’ [-i] is not allowed to vary). On each cycle of the simulation, a randomly selected exemplar is chosen as the base for a ‘production’ and subjected to analogical pressure from other exemplars in the lexicon – with special weight given to exemplars in the same paradigm – plus a small amount of noise. Each production is then probabilistically categorized as a member of the exemplar cloud it most closely resembles; the production is stored as a new exemplar in the cloud, replacing a randomly selected old exemplar if the cloud is already full. Under these conditions, the lexicon evolves to near-perfect paradigm uniformity, even when the initial nominative and accusative seeds are unrelated.Simulation B shows the problem that arises when bias is added to the production process in this simple model, such that word-final consonants have a small chance of being devoiced. Word-final consonants evolve to become consistently voiceless, as expected. However, the corresponding stem-final consonants in the accusative forms are also consistently voiceless, due to the pressure toward paradigm uniformity, despite the fact that they are not themselves word- final. In simulations of this type, it appears to be impossible to model positional neutralization: the consonants in the non-neutralizing position are ‘pulled’ towards the voiceless forms by paradigm uniformity, and there is no counteracting pressure to encourage retention of voiced consonants.The problem cannot be solved by adding another bias to production, one that encourages voicing in non-final consonants; this would lead to simple allophony, in which consonants are voiceless word-finally and voiced elsewhere. Nor can it be solved by looking for regularities in the distribution of voicing in non-neutralized forms; even when those regularities are real (e.g., Ernestus and Baayen 2003), we are still left with a residue of unpredictability to account for. What we need is a way to allow contrast word-medially, such that voiced and voiceless consonants are both allowed and voicing is specified unpredictably on a word-by-word basis.The solution adopted here is to allow paradigm uniformity to operate non-symmetrically: neutralized forms are under pressure to resemble non-neutralized forms, but not vice versa. This approach ensures the similarity of morphologically related forms without propagating neutralization throughout the paradigm. The approach has a principled basis; Albright (2010) and Albright and Kang (2009) present evidence that the base of an inflectional paradigm is the paradigm’s most informative member – effectively, the member that is least neutralized.Simulation C operationalizes ‘informativity’ as entropy (Shannon, 1948): the probability that some feature of a production of a given wordform will be altered to match another member of the same paradigm is proportional to the entropy of that feature across all words with the same case as the other member. As the bias toward final devoicing leads to consistently voiceless final consonants, the entropy of the [voice] feature of final consonants in the nominative quickly approaches zero, and accusative forms are therefore unlikely to be influenced by them. As shown in Table 1, the result is a robust pattern of final devoicing but non-final contrast.If exemplar-based approaches are to be viable models of language, they must be able to handle patterns such as positional neutralization that have been described so successfully in more traditional frameworks. The present study represents an important advance on previous implementations by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to model positional neutralization in an episodic, surface-form-based model without abstract underlying stems. Moreover, these results provide further evidence for a particular type of paradigm uniformity: one that, in effect, makes reference to a privileged base. Table 1: Results of simulations under various settings. Each simulation was run 100 times;representative examples are given here.Simulation ASimulation BSimulation CNOMACCNOMACCNOMACCpigbigibitbititaptabipukpukigitgitibapbapidakdakigutgutitattatipidpidipukpukibukbugibupbupidatdatidupdupitiktikipatpatibapbapipukpukigitgitibapbapipukpukigitgitibapbapidukdukigutgutiditdiditidtiditiktikituktagi

AbstractExperimental data on final devoicing in languages such as German and Russian usually show that speakers produce incompletely neutralized acoustic differences between words ending in phonologically voiced versus voiceless obstruents (e.g., /kod/ ‘code’ vs. /kot/ ‘cat’ in Russian) and that listeners can use these differences to identify the underlying specification of final consonants at an above-chance level. The current study examines how the seemingly successful perceptual identification of voicing varies across stimulus items recorded in reading vs. non-reading procedures and with and without full minimal pairs present in the experimental list. Results of a series of identification tasks reveal that Russian listeners’ identification responses are more in line with underlying voicing for the stimuli recorded during word-reading and with minimal pairs included among the experimental items. This shows that voicing judgments are strongly influenced by the acoustic differences produced when speakers encounter orthographic forms or lexical competition. At the same time, perceptual neutralization is also not complete for the items recorded without such exposure, which indicates that listeners’ ability to recover underlying voicing is not limited to the production contexts involving written forms or minimal pairs.