V/C ratio as a postvocalic voicing cue

Abstract

Changes in the phonological voicing of English obstruents following stressed vowels cause inverse durational effects on the vowel and following consonant. Several experiments extended our previous results suggesting that the relative duration of the V to C is an important cue for phonological voicing of the C when dominant cues of closure voicing and aspiration are absent. Synthetic stimuli of the words dibber and dipper, created with five durations of dib (140–260 ms) and nine medial stop closure durations (20–140 ms), were identified by 16 listeners. The boundary along the stop duration continuum was different for each dib duration, but, when plotted as the ratio of the stop closure to the preceding vowel, all curves were superimposed. In a matching 8xperiment with digger‐dicker, the same effect was found except that the V/C ratio boundary was different for the velars—as was expected from production results. These findings, similar to the V:C‐VC: syllable‐type contrasts in other Germanic languages, imply that the voicing effect on preceding vowels cannot be handled insightfully with a postsegmental temporal implementation rule that modifies the vowel [D. H. Klatt, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 59, 1208–1221 (1976)] since production and perception data now agree that the phonologlcally relevant parameter is an abstract ratio between these two intervals appropriate for a particular context. [Work supported by NIH.]