Empirical evidence for laryngeal features: Aspirating vs. true voice languages

Abstract

It is well known that German utterance-initial lenis stops are voiceless but that German intervocalic (or intersonorant) lenis stops are sometimes produced with voicing. This variable voicing can be understood as passive voicing, voicing that results because of the voiced context, rather than from active voicing gestures by speakers. Thus, speakers are not actively aiming to voice intervocalic stops, just as they are not actively aiming to voice utterance-initial stops (Jessen & Ringen 2002, Jessen 2004). If this is correct, the variable voicing that occurs in aspirating languages should be different from the voicing that occurs in true voice languages (such as Russian), in which speakers are actively aiming to voice both initial and intervocalic lenis stops. Since there is little data on the relative amount of intervocalic voicing in true voice languages, however, it has been difficult to evaluate this prediction. The purpose of this paper is to compare data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in German and English with data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in true voice languages. We find that the differences are substantial, supporting the claim that aspirating languages are not like true voice languages, in which the feature of contrast is [voice].

Voice Onset Time (VOT) at 50: Theoretical and practical issues in measuring voicing distinctions

“…Some phonological features have been proposed that incorporate VOT (Gallagher, 2011, 2015). Most phonologists, however, take VOT as an aspect of the realization of more standard features such as +/− voice (e.g., Wetzels & Mascaró, 2001) and/or +/− spread glottis (e.g., Beckman, Jessen, & Ringen, 2013). There is also evidence that the phonological status of the VOT categories affects implementation at prosodic boundaries (Cho, Lee, & Kim, 2014; Cho & McQueen, 2005).…”

Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel F0: Implications for laryngeal realism

“…This is only one of many cross-linguistic differences that go unexplained in any descriptive system, such as that proposed in the Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968), that treats all two-way laryngeal contrasts in terms of a single feature [±voice]. One proposed solution to such issues is a descriptive system with two separate features that reflect two different laryngeal gestures (Avery and Idsardi 2001;Beckman, Jessen and Ringen 2013;Honeybone 2005;Iverson and Salmons 1995;Jessen and Ringen 2002). This idea has antecedents as far back as Sievers 1876 (and more recently Jakobson 1949); one recent manifestation of this idea sometimes goes by the name of LARYNGEAL REALISM, a term coined by Honeybone (2002).…”

Voicing distinctions in the Dutch-German dialect continuum

“…in voicing languages these are always fully voiced, whereas in aspiration languages they can be either fully or partially voiced (Beckman et al 2013). Full voicing in the latter case is argued to be an effect of phonetics (spontaneous voicing) rather than phonology.…”