Effects of stress and utterance position on stop voicing

Abstract

Duration and glottal pulsing are known to distinguish voiced from voiceless stops in certain phonetic contexts. This study examined the effect of stress and position‐within‐utterance on these temporal and laryngeal correlates of stop voicing. Eight talkers produced utterances consisting of from one to five tokens of/papa/or/baba/. The duration of stops and vowels was measured from intraoral air pressure traces sensed via a tube inserted in the mouth. The output of a throat microphone was used to calculate the percentage of stop closure intervals showing signs of laryngeal activity. It was found that a laryngeal contrast between/p/ and /b/was maintained in all positions except utterance‐initial position. Vowels were consistently longer before /b/ than /p/. The closure of /p/was longer than that of /b/ everywhere except in utterance‐initial position. Thus, the supra‐segmental factors which affect segment duration obscure a temporal correlate of phonological voicing only in utterance‐initial position where n...