Assessing incomplete neutralization of final devoicing in German

Abstract

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.

Whence the fuzziness? Morphological effects in interacting sound changes in Southern British English

“…Roettger et al (2014) make a case for this, looking at near-neutralization of voicing in German. Several studies find small, but systematic differences in ostensibly neutralized word-final stops in German (Port et al, 1981;Port & Crawford, 1989;Charles-Luce, 1985;Kleber et al, 2010).…”

The relationship between prosodic weakening and sound change: evidence from the German tense/lax vowel contrast

“…First, in contrast to those studies, we found no evidence of a shortening of the lexically stressed vowel in disyllables compared with monosyllables, which, for accented and deaccented words in our study, were instead associated with differences in the ratio of the lexically stressed vowel to that of the following consonant cluster. Second, the greater duration of the /kt/ cluster in disyllables than in their monosyllabic counterparts may instead be due to the presence of a syllable boundary within the /kt/ cluster in sack.te and sag.te (as a result of which, according to some accounts, an underlying voiced /ɡ/ in the stem of sag becomes voiceless by a rule of syllable or word-final devoicingsee, e.g., Röttger et al [2014] for a recent review and analysis). Whether the mechanism is polysyllabic shortening or presence vs. absence of a syllable boundary within the cluster or some form of both, the conclusion is the same: classifications of lax /a/ vs. tense /aː/ are influenced by the syllable count (monosyllables vs. disyllables) but less so in deaccented compared with accented words.…”

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

“…If speakers' goal were to disambiguate the potentially homophonous forms, voicing cues would be expected to have a major effect on the outcome of the categorization process across all production contexts and not only for the stimuli elicited during word-reading and with minimal pairs included in the experimental list. This suggests that such differences are not the result of a specific articulatory goal but more likely a by-product of various automated processes taking place during lexical access and speech planning, such as automatic co-activation of morphologically related forms (Ernestus and Baayen 2006;Goldrick and Blumstein 2006;Winter and Röttger 2011;Röttger et al 2014). This seems especially likely considering the generally small magnitude of production differences in incomplete neutralization studies, such as the vowel duration differences of 3.5 ms in Warner et al (2004) or the consonantal duration differences of 5 ms in Kharlamov (2014).…”

“…Production data from languages with final devoicing, including German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Polish, and Russian, often show reliable differences between the surface forms of phonologically voiced versus voiceless obstruents (e.g., Chen 1970;Charles-Luce 1985;Port and O'Dell 1985;Slowiaczek and Dinnsen 1985;Tieszen 1997;van Rooy et al 2003;Piroth and Janker 2004;Smith et al 2009;Dmitrieva et al 2010;Rӧttger et al 2011;Kharlamov 2014;Röttger et al 2014). This phenomenon is traditionally referred to as 'incomplete neutralization', and it tends to affect the acoustic parameters of consonantal duration, glottal pulsing, and preceding vowel duration.…”