Corpus-Based Investigations on the Phonetics of Consonant Voicing

Abstract

Within and across languages the realization of consonant voicing is highly variable. This study aims to identify, and quantify, the segmental, prosodic and positional factors that have an influence on consonant voicing. A widely used acoustic measure of voicing, viz. voice onset time, is known to have disadvantages both in a cross-linguistic framework, where it fails to provide sufficient information for certain stop consonant classifications, and across consonant classes because it is not defined for fricatives and sonorants. This study applies the voicing profile method to the analysis of voicing properties of consonants in German. The voicing profile is defined as the frame-by-frame voicing status of speech sound realizations in a speech corpus. The speech database was judiciously constructed to cover systematically all possible speech sound combinations in German and a number of positional and prosodic contexts in which these combinations occur. The results are put in a cross-linguistic perspective by comparing the voicing profiles of German stops to those of stops in three other languages, viz. Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Mexican Spanish. The results are also discussed in the context of the production and maintenance of voicing during speech production. The voicing profile analysis is intended to serve as a methodology for investigating the discrepancies between the phonemic voicing specification of a speech sound and its phonetic realization in connected speech.