Volume 6, Issue 2 -

Experimental 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.

Many languages have been claimed to have phonological patterns that are sensitive to the need to avoid homophony – for example, a rule that is blocked if it would create a surface form that is identical to another word in the language. Such patterns always involve comparisons between words in the same morphological paradigm (e.g., singular and plural forms with the same stem). The lone exception to this generalization is Ichimura (2006), who argues that a nasal contraction pattern in Japanese is blocked by potential homophony between verbs with different stems. We present experimental evidence that homophony avoidance is not part of the correct synchronic description of the environment in which this pattern applies; rather, nasal contraction does not productively delete stem-final vowels. However, homophony avoidance does appear to affect the probability with which contraction applies. We conclude that homophony avoidance affects phonological behavior, but that absolute homophony-related blocking is restricted to morphological paradigms.

Scottish Gaelic is sometimes described as having nasalized fricatives (/ṽ/ distinctively, and [f̃, x̃, h̃], etc. through assimilation). However, there are claims that it is not aerodynamically possible to open the velum for nasalization while maintaining frication noise. We present aerodynamic data from 14 native Scottish Gaelic speakers to determine how the posited nasalized fricatives in this language are realized. Most tokens demonstrate loss of nasalization, but nasalization does occur in some contexts without aerodynamic conflict, e.g., nasalization with the consonant realized as an approximant, nasalization of [h̃], nasalization on the preceding vowel, or sequential frication and nasalization. Furthermore, a very few tokens do contain simultaneous nasalization and frication with a trade-off in airflow. We also present perceptual evidence showing that Gaelic listeners can hear this distinction slightly better than chance. Thus, instrumental data from one of the few languages in the world described as having nasalized fricatives confirms that the claimed sounds are not made by producing strong nasalization concurrently with clear frication noise. Furthermore, although speakers most often neutralize the nasalization, when they maintain it, they do so through a variety of phonetic mechanisms, even within a single language.

The duration and occasional deletion rate of consonants differ from one language to another. What causes a language to preserve and lengthen some consonants but shorten and delete others? I show that the typology of consonant duration and occasional deletion in American English is affected by consonants’ informativity – their average local predictability. Informativity can explain why usually-predictable segments such as American English /t/ are likely to be reduced even when they are locally unpredictable, but usually-predictable segments are preserved even when they are redundant. I use four corpus studies to demonstrate that higher informativity leads to longer duration and reduced likelihood to delete even when other important factors such as the phonetic features, frequency, and local predictability of consonants are controlled for. The role of informativity in the duration and deletion rates of consonants can bridge the gap between phonetic performance and the actuation of phonological processes.