Syllable-final fricatives: Dutch and English listeners’ processing of voicing

Abstract

English and Dutch have both voiced and voiceless fricatives, and, in English, both occur in either syllable-initial or -final position. In Dutch, however, only voiceless fricatives can occur in syllable-final position. A categorization experiment investigated the processing of the voicing distinction in English fricatives by Dutch and English listeners, and in particular whether Dutch listeners can distinguish voicing contrasts in syllable-final position, and whether preceding vowel length informs their voicing judgments. Dutch and English participants heard tokens from an 11-step /v-f/ continuum, at the end of a single nonword. As the nonword context was kept constant within each block, vowel length could not serve as a cue. Half of the participants heard nonword contexts which were originally pronounced with a final /v/, the other half with final /f/. Therefore, in both cases a mismatch occurred for a subset of the items between vowel length and the other information in the signal. This mismatch hampered the performance of the English but not the Dutch listeners, so that the Dutch listeners outperformed the English in mismatching cases. This suggests that the Dutch did not rely on vowel length as a cue to voicing as strongly as the English.