Abstract
An acoustic experiment on final devoicing in Polish, aimed at providing new data on incomplete neutralisation, is described. The experiment was modelled on a study of German by Roettger et al. (2014), who mitigated possible effects of orthography by employing a word-formation task based on auditory stimuli, eliciting stop-final nonce words with underlying final voiced or voiceless stops. Our results provide some evidence for incomplete neutralisation in Polish, with an effect on closure duration, but not on preceding vowel duration, as well as interspeaker variation in the reliability of contrast maintenance. Considered against the background of studies from other languages, the results point to implementational differences in incomplete neutralisation effects as a function of laryngeal typology, which are accounted for in the Onset Prominence representational model.
Highlights
This paper presents new acoustic data on the production of the word-final laryngeal contrast by speakers of Polish
The analyses revealed only small inter-annotator differences in the probability of observing incomplete neutralisation effects (0.69 vs. 0.64 for vowel duration; 0.93 vs. 0.99 for closure duration)
The mean differences are in the expected direction for both acoustic measures, but are less than 10 ms (6.8 ms for vowel duration, ―7.4 ms for closure duration)
Summary
This paper presents new acoustic data on the production of the word-final laryngeal contrast by speakers of Polish. Polish is one of many languages reported to eliminate final voice contrasts by means of a phonological rule of word-final obstruent devoicing. In Polish and other languages, small but systematic phonetic differences have been identified between voiceless and devoiced obstruents IP address: 146.19.101.254, on 01 Mar 2022 at 22:50:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. Port & O’Dell 1985, Slowiaczek & Dinnsen 1985); the latter are assumed to be underlyingly voiced on the basis of morphologically related forms. Differences have been observed in the following phonetic parameters: duration of the preceding vowel, duration of the stop closure, duration of noise burst/frication and duration of voicing during stop closure/frication.
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