Devoicing of word-initial stops: A consequence of the following vowel.

ABSTRACT: The aim of the current study is to investigate the contextual conditions of devoicing of phonologically voiced stops. Therefore articulatory and acoustical data of 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 followed by a low or mid vowel. To test whether articulatory positions are affected by the identity of the following vowel ANOVAs were computed. All subjects showed significant effects on positional data varying with place of articulation of the stop. Percentage of devoicing was significantly correlated with vertical and horizontal tongue positions for the velar and with the vertical jaw position for both stops. Stepwise regression models were computed to achieve an objective measure for the relevance of the measured parameters. We assume that in German movement economy, i.e. coarticulation, is more important than the maintenance of voicing during the closure, which is in agreement with the view that the voicing distinction in German is primarily produced by a longer VOT for the voiceless stops.caslBoersma, P. and Weenink, D. (1999). PRAAT, a system for doing phonetics by computer- Report of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences of the University of Amsterdam, 132-182. Bortz, J. (1979). Lehrbuch der Statistik - F_r Sozialwissenschaftler. Berlin: Springer Verlag Gibbon, F. and Nicolaidis, K. (1999). Palatography. In W.J. Hardcastle and N. Newlett (Eds.), Coarticulation (pp 229-245), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fischer-Jrgensen, E. (1968). Voicing, Tenseness and Aspiration in Stop Consonants, with Special Reference to French and Danish. ARIPUC, 3, 63-115. Hoole, P. and Kroos, C. (1998). Control of larynx height in vowel production. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2, 531-534. Jessen, M. (2001). Phonetic implementation of the distinctive auditory feature [voice] and [tense] in stop consonants. In Hall, T.A. (Ed.), Distinctive feature theory (pp 237-294). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Kawahara, S. (2004). An Acoustic and perceptual study of Japanese voiced geminates. Manuscript for UMASS Mini-Conference. 18 Klatt, D.H. (1975). Voice onset time, frication, and aspiration in word-initial consonants clusters. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 18, 686-706. Keating, P., Linker, W. and Huffman, M. (1983). Patterns in allophone distribution for voiced and voiceless stops. Journal of Phonetics, 11, 277-290. Maddieson, I. (2003). Phonological typology in geographical perspective. Proceedings of the 15th ICPhS in Barcelona, 719-722. Shih, C. and Mbius, B. (1999). Contextual effects on consonantal voicing profiles: A crosslinguistic study. Proceedings of the 14th ICPhS in San Francisco, 2, 989-992. Stevens, K.N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics (p. 512). Cambridge: The MIT Press. Tiede, M.K. (1996). An MRI-based study of pharyngeal volume contrasts in Akan and English. Journal of Phonetics 24 399-421 Ohala. J. and Riordan, C. (1980). Passive vocal tract enlargement during voiced stops. Report of the Phonological Laboratory UC Berkeley 5, 78-87. Ohala, J. (2003). Effects on speech of introducing aerodynamic perturbations. Proceedings of the 15th ICPhS in Barcelona, 2913-2916. Westbury, J.R. (1983). Enlargement of the supraglottal cavity and its relation to stop consonant voicing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 73, 1322-1336. Westbury, J.R. and Keating, P. (1985). On the naturalness of stop consonant voicing. Journal of Linguistics, 22, 145-166.pub2214pu