INCOMPLETE NEUTRALIZATION AND TASK EFFECTS IN EXPERIMENTALLY- ELICITED SPEECH: EVIDENCE FROM THE PRODUCTION AND PERCEPTION OF WORD-FINAL DEVOICING IN RUSSIAN.

ii This dissertation investigates the role of grammatical versus methodological influences in the production and perception of final devoicing in experimentally-elicited speech from Russian. It addresses the question of how the partial preservation of the phonological voicing contrast in word-final obstruents is affected by (i) task-independent factors that reflect phonological and lexical properties of stimuli words (underlying voicing, word length, lexical competition) and (ii) task-dependent biases that arise due to the nature of the experimental task performed by the speaker (availability of orthographic inputs, presence of minimal pairs among the stimuli). Results of a series of acoustic production and perceptual identification tasks reveal that task-dependent factors account for the presence of robust and perceptually salient differences in the parameter of phonetic voicing. Several types of stimuli items also show limited but statistically significant differences in closure/frication duration and release duration that are independent of the presence of orthography or inclusion of full minimal pairs among tes