6. Intraparadigmatic effects on the perception of voice

Abstract

In Dutch, all morpheme-final obstruents are voiceless in word-final position. As a consequence, the distinction between obstruents that are voiced before vowel-initial suffixes and those that are always voiceless is neutralized. This study adds to the existing evidence that the neutralization is incomplete: neutralized, alternating plosives tend to have shorter bursts than non-alternating plosives. Furthermore, in a rating study, listeners scored the alternating plosives as more voiced than the nonalternating plosives, showing sensitivity to the subtle subphonemic cues in the acoustic signal. Importantly, the participants who were presented with the complete words, instead of just the final rhymes, scored the voiceless alternating plosives as even more voiced. This shows that listeners' perception of voice is affected by their knowledge of the obstruent's realization in the word's morphological paradigm. Apparently, subphonemic paradigmatic levelling is a characteristic of both production and perception. We explain the effects within an analogy-based approach.

Constraints on the Transfer of Perceptual Learning in Accented Speech

“…Together these results illustrate that the word-final devoicing by the Dutch speaker affects more than one acoustic dimension and that it affects relevant dimensions differently. The incomplete nature of the devoicing is consistent with previous findings for Dutch (e.g., Ernestus and Baayen, 2007) and Dutch-accented English (Warner et al, 2004), and suggests a transfer of this aspect of native-language phonology to the second language.…”

Perception of incompletely neutralized voicing cues in word-final obstruents: The role of differences in production context

“…For example, during forced-choice two-alternative identification tasks, speakers of German have shown above-chance-level performance on voicing, with the majority of phonologically voiced but phonetically devoiced segments being attributed to the voiced category (e.g., Port and O'Dell 1985;Port and Crawford 1989;Röttger et al 2011). Comparable results have also been reported for other devoicing languages, including Dutch (e.g., Warner et al 2004) and Polish (e.g., Slowiaczek and Szymanska 1989), as well as for other types of perceptual tasks, such as discrimination experiments (e.g., Matsui 2011) and rating tasks (e.g., Ernestus et al 2007a). This suggests that listeners perceive the partial cues to voicing and interpret them as evidence of the target segment being [þvoiced].…”

“…When voicing effects are observed in production data, they are usually attributed to speakers' producing incompletely neutralized consonants because they are aware of these segments being voiced at the phonological level or because they know that the same consonant is articulated as voiced when non-final in morphologically-related forms (among others, Port 1996;Port and Leary 2005;Ernestus et al 2007a, Ernestus et al 2007b). However, incompletely neutralized differences are also known to be motivated in production by speakers' exposure to orthographic representations during word-reading tasks and inclusion of minimal pairs among the stimuli (among others, Fourakis and Iverson 1984;Mascaró 1987;Jassem and Richter 1989;Manaster Ramer 1996a, Manaster Ramer 1996bWarner et al 2004;Warner et al 2006;Iverson and Salmons 2011;Kharlamov 2014).…”

Incomplete devoicing in formal phonology

“…(i) There is a phonetic paradigmatic effect (Ernestus and Baayen, 2007); the phonetic implementation of words ending in a voiced obstruent is influenced by the fact that the same word is pronounced with a voiced obstruent in other positions in the paradigm. 'Word-based phonetics' (Pierrehumbert, 2002) is a possible implementation of this idea.…”