Incomplete neutralization and other sub-phonemic durational differences in production and perception: evidence from Dutch

Abstract

Words which are expected to contain the same surface string of segments may, under identical prosodic circumstances, sometimes be realized with slight differences in duration. Some researchers have attributed such effects to differences in the words' underlying forms (incomplete neutralization), while others have suggested orthographic influence and extremely careful speech as the cause. In this paper, we demonstrate such sub-phonemic durational differences in Dutch, a language which some past research has found not to have such effects. Past literature has also shown that listeners can often make use of incomplete neutralization to distinguish apparent homophones. We extend perceptual investigations of this topic, and show that listeners can perceive even durational differences which are not consistently observed in production. We further show that a difference which is primarily orthographic rather than underlying can also create such durational differences. We conclude that a wide variety of factors, in addition to underlying form, can induce speakers to produce slight durational differences which listeners can also use in perception.

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].…”

“…At the same time, experimental studies have repeatedly shown that speakers of neutralizing languages maintain acoustic differences between phonologically voiced versus voiceless final obstruents and that listeners can often identify the voicing setting of such segments at an above-chance level (e.g., Port and O'Dell 1985;Warner et al 2004). The current study investigates how such identification responses vary depending on whether the perceptual stimuli were recorded using reading vs. non-reading procedures and with vs. without full minimal pairs in the experimental list.…”

“…Incomplete neutralization has also been attested in the domain of perception, where the rates of voiced responses vary depending on the phonological voicing setting of the final consonant despite its phonetic devoicing (Port and O'Dell 1985;Port and Crawford 1989;Slowiaczek and Szymanska 1989;Warner et al 2004;Röttger et al 2011). 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).…”

“…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). For example, Fourakis and Iverson (1984) found incompletely neutralized differences in German in the tokens elicited during a word-reading task but not in the items recorded during an oral task.…”

“…Considering that the previous perception findings have been based on (i) the stimuli recorded in word-reading tasks with voicing-based minimal pairs included in the experimental list (e.g., Port and O'Dell 1985;Port and Crawford 1989;Slowiaczek and Szymanska 1989;Warner et al 2004), (ii) word-reading tasks without minimal pairs among the stimuli (e.g., Ernestus et al 2007a), or (iii) oral tasks with minimal pairs among the stimuli (e.g., Jassem and Richter 1989;Matsui 2011;Röttger et al 2011), listeners' apparent ability to correctly identify intended voicing may then be due to their reliance on those hyper-articulated differences that are present in the stimuli as a result of speakers' exposure to either written forms or lexical competition or both. Moreover, many previous perception studies limited their scope to monosyllabic words ending in coronal stops (e.g., Port and Crawford 1989;van Rooy et al 2003;Warner et al 2004) and relied on small samples of speakers or stimulus items, such as testing 10 or fewer participants and/or stimulus items (e.g., Port and Crawford 1989;Kopkalli 1993;Matsui 2011;Röttger et al 2011).…”