Volume 42, Issue 1

Vocal fold adjustments in Danish aspirated and unaspirated stops were investigated by electromyography, photo-electric glottography, and fiberoptic stills. The results show that these two stop types are produced primarily by different types of glottal gesture, rather than by a different timing of the glottal and supraglottal articulations. Other, more general aspects of glottal behaviour in relation to aspiration and devoicing in stops are also discussed.

The perception of assimilation of ‘voice’ in Dutch two-obstruent clusters across word boundaries was measured as a function of cluster duration. In an experiment employing synthetic speech stimuli the duration of the silent interval of the plosives and of the noise part of the fricatives was varied. The clusters were embedded in three types of linguistic context: sentences, words, and nonsense words. Longer durations gave rise to more ‘voiceless’ percepts, resulting in the perception of more ‘progressive assimilation’, at the expense of ‘regressive assimilation’ and ‘no assimilation’. Nonwords behaved slightly differently from sentences and words. The different response pattern for nonwords is ascribed to a different phonetic context rather than to lexical or phonological factors.

Speech samples (720 CVC words) from 10 adult male Nepali speakers are analyzed with the aid of a video spectrograph. The distributions of VOT based on group data for each of four phonemic stop categories show that only three of the categories can be differentiated by VOT alone: voice lead, short-lag and long-lag stops. The fourth category, voiced aspirate, contains VOT values from both pre- and postrelease areas of the VOT timeline. Analysis of individual data reveals marked intersubject variability in the VOT distribution of the voiced aspirate category supporting the necessity of multiple subject samples in acoustically based cross-linguistic studies.