Abstract
AbstractIt has been long acknowledged that the perception and production of speech is affected by the presence or absence of higher levels of linguistic information, too. The recoverability of meaning heavily relies on semantic context, similarly, the precision of articulation is inversely proportional to the presence of semantic information. The present study explores the recoverability of the voice feature of word-final alveolar fricatives in minimal pairs in Hungarian in phonetic contexts that trigger regressive voicing assimilation. Specifically, it aims to clarify whether the acoustic differences found in earlier studies are perceptually salient enough to distinguish underlying voicing in minimal pairs in semantically ambiguous contexts. For this reason, a perception study with the synthesised minimal pairmész–méz‘whitewash–honey’ was carried out where the amount of voicing in the fricative, and the duration of the fricative and vowel were manipulated. The target words appeared in the following three phonetic contexts: before /p/, before /b/ and before the vowel /a/. Our results suggest that the observed acoustic differences in most of the cases remain below the perceptual threshold which means that phonological contrast is indeed neutralised before obstruents in Hungarian, and this may cause semantic ambiguity.
Highlights
The speech signal is by nature highly variable, partly because of the individual physiological differences between speakers, partly because of intended differences between individual utterances due to speech rate or any other prosodic manipulations, and partly because of the phonetic context a speech sound is in
The present study explores the recoverability of the voice feature of word-final alveolar fricatives in minimal pairs in Hungarian in phonetic contexts that trigger regressive voicing assimilation
Our results suggest that the observed acoustic differences in most of the cases remain below the perceptual threshold which means that phonological contrast is neutralised before obstruents in Hungarian, and this may cause semantic ambiguity
Summary
The speech signal is by nature highly variable, partly because of the individual physiological differences between speakers, partly because of intended differences between individual utterances due to speech rate or any other prosodic manipulations, and partly because of the phonetic context a speech sound is in. If a segment becomes more similar to the speech sound preceding or following it, we speak about assimilation. Assimilation can be so strong that a contrastive segment may lose its distinctive power fully or partially which might hinder its recoverability during perception. It has been long acknowledged that the perception and production of speech are affected by the presence or absence of higher levels of linguistic information, too. The recoverability of meaning heavily relies on semantic context, the precision of articulation is inversely proportional to the presence of semantic information (Liberman & Mattingly 1985). There is ample evidence from speech production studies that lexical neighbours affect the fine phonetic realisation of words (see Goldrick et al 2013 and the references therein). Voiceless stops in words with a minimal pair neighbour (cod vs. god) are produced with longer VOTs than stops in matched words without minimal pairs (cop with no corresponding pgop) (Bease-Berk & Goldrick 2009)
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