It has been claimed that the long established neutralization of the voicing distinction in domain final position in German is phonetically incomplete. However, various studies leading to this claim have been criticized in terms of their methodology. In three production experiments and one perception experiment we address these methodological criticisms. In the first production study, we address the role of orthography. In a large scale auditory task using pseudowords, we confirm that neutralization is indeed incomplete and suggest that previous null results may simply be due to lack of statistical power. In two follow-up production studies (experiments 2 and 3), we rule out a potential confound of experiment 1, namely that the effect might be due to accommodation to the presented auditory stimuli. Here we bias the auditory stimuli against the phenomenon by manipulating the duration of the preceding vowel. While experiment 2 replicated our findings, experiment 3 failed to replicate incomplete neutralization statistically, even though we found numerical tendencies into the expected direction. Finally, in a perception study (experiment 4), we demonstrate that the subphonemic differences between final voiceless and "devoiced" stops are audible, but only barely so. Even though the present findings provide evidence for incomplete neutralization, the small effect sizes obtained further highlight the limits of investigating incomplete neutralization emphasizing the limited importance of this phenomenon for everyday speech communication. We argue that without postulating functional relevance, incomplete neutralization can be accounted for by recent models of lexical organization and is compatible with formal phonological models that entertain unpronounced projection relations.

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Despite the robustness of the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) and linguistic markedness of response codes (MARC) effect, the mechanisms that underlie these effects are still under debate. In this paper, we investigate the extraction of quantity information from German number words and nouns inflected for singular and plural using two alternative forced choice paradigms. These paradigms are applied to different tasks to investigate how access to quantity representation is modulated by task demands. In Experiment 1, we replicated previous SNARC findings for number words-that is, a relative left-hand advantage for words denoting small numbers and a right-hand advantage for words denoting large numbers in semantic tasks (parity decision and quantity comparison). No SNARC effect was obtained for surface or lexical processing tasks (font categorization and lexical decision). In Experiment 2, we found that German words inflected for singular had a relative left-hand advantage, and German words inflected for plural a relative right-hand advantage, showing a SNARC-like effect for grammatical number. The effect interfered, however, with a MARC-like effect based on the markedness asymmetry of singulars and plurals. These two effects appear to be dissociated by response latency rather than task demands, with MARC being more pronounced in early responses and SNARC being more pronounced in late responses. The present findings shed light on the relationship of conceptual number and grammatical number and constrain current accounts of the SNARC and MARC effects.

The study of the acoustic correlates of word stress has been a fruitful area of phonetic research since the seminal research on American English by Dennis Fry over 50 years ago. This paper presents results of a cross-linguistic survey designed to distill a clearer picture of the relative robustness of different acoustic exponents of what has been referred to as word stress. Drawing on a survey of 110 (sub-) studies on 75 languages, we discuss the relative efficacy of various acoustic parameters in distinguishing stress levels.

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