Volume 41, Issue 3

Two studies investigated the influence of the independently varied durations of preceding and following signal portions on the amount of closure silence needed to perceive ‘splash’ rather than ‘slash’. Increases (or decreases) in the durations of the [s] and [l] acoustic segments had opposite effects which cancelled when the silent intervals were short (experiment 1), but yielded a net effect due to [s] duration when the silent intervals were long (experiment 2). These findings, which resolve a conflict between earlier results in the literature, are interpreted as reflecting a perceptual compensation for coarticulatory shortening of [s] before stop consonants, in conjunction with (possibly psychoacoustic) contrastive interactions between the perceived durations of adjacent acoustic segments. The results suggest that local temporal signal properties, as distinct from global perceived speaking rate, are an important factor in phonetic perception.

General articulatory characteristics and V-to-C coarticulatory effects for alve-olo-palatals [É], [λ] versus sequences [nj], [lj] in Catalan VCV utterances have been measured at the point of maximum alveolar contact and over time by means of dynamic palatography. Data show that the amount of V-to-C coarticulation in tongue dorsum contact varies inversely with the duration of the temporal lag between the periods of alveolar closure and palatal closure. Results support the view that coarticulation is affected by contrasting timing constraints on articulatory activity.

Recent work in acoustic phonetics purports to show that neutralization of the voiced/voiceless contrast in final position in German is only apparent, because it is incomplete. Thus, a recent study shows that native speakers of German do regularly devoice word-final obstruents, but they also produce slightly longer vowels before the morphophonemically voiced obstruents (e.g. Rad ‘wheel’) than before the voiceless ones (e.g. Rat ‘advice’). However, our work replicating these studies indicates that the previously observed differences actually resulted from hypercorrect spelling pronunciation, and that in more natural linguistic contexts the neutralization is indeed complete.

This paper examines the wide spectrum of phonetic properties associated with the phonological distinctions between consonant classes such as /p, t, k/ and /b, d, g/ in a great variety of languages (including languages with multivalued contrasts) and evaluates their relationship to the features [ ± voiced], [ ± aspirated], [ ± fortis]. The discussion separates word-initial, word-medial and word-final positions according to their different production and signalling constraints. A power feature, realized in articulatory timing and/or phonatory power/tension, is set up as the essential differentiator, thus providing a phonetic basis for the fortis/lenis dichotomy. The incorporation of the time dimension into phonology is regarded as a necessary prerequisite to the solution of phonological problems in general and to an adequate treatment of the [ ± voiced] feature in particular, voice onset time being only one temporal aspect.