Prosodic strengthening of German fricatives in duration and assimilatory devoicing

Abstract

This study addressed prosodic effects on the duration of and amount of glottal vibration in German word-initial fricatives /f, v, z/ in assimilatory and non-assimilatory devoicing contexts. Fricatives following /a/ (non-assimilation context) were longer and were produced with less glottal vibration after higher prosodic boundaries, reflecting domain initial prosodic strengthening. After /t/ (assimilation context), lenis fricatives (/v, z/) were produced with less glottal vibration than after /a/, due to assimilatory devoicing. This devoicing was especially strong across lower prosodic boundaries, showing the influence of prosodic structure on sandhi processes. Reduction in glottal vibration made lenis fricatives more fortis-like (/f, z/). Importantly, fricative duration, another major cue to the fortis-lenis distinction, was affected by initial lengthening, but not by assimilation. Hence, at smaller boundaries, fricatives were more devoiced (more fortis-like), but shorter (more lenis-like). As a consequence, the fortis and lenis fricatives remained acoustically distinct in all prosodic and segmental contexts. Overall, /z/ was devoiced to a greater extent than /v/. Since /z/ does not have a fortis counterpart in word-initial position, these findings suggest that phonotactic restrictions constrain phonetic processes. The present study illuminates a complex interaction of prosody, sandhi processes, and phonotactics, yielding systematic phonetic cues to prosodic structure and phonological distinctions.

The Phonetic Manifestation of French /s#∫/ and /∫#s/ Sequences in Different Vowel Contexts: On the Occurrence and the Domain of Sibilant Assimilation

“…For example, Kohler and Künzel [1979] report with regard to voice assimilation in French that the assimilation towards voicing or voicelessness need not affect the duration and formant patterns that are related to the voicevoiceless distinction in the adjacent vowel. Similar observations were made for English by Smith [1997] and Myers [2010] as well as for German by Kuzla et al [2007].…”

Prosodic conditioning of phonetic detail in German plosives

“…In these sentences, we can expect prosodic boundaries larger than a word boundary before the target word, but smaller than, for instance, an Intonation Phrase boundary. We chose two different sentence types to elicit these types of boundaries (Types B and C), because it is unclear from the literature (e.g., Fé ry, 1993;Fox, 1993;Grabe, 1998) whether they indeed elicit intermediate prosodic boundaries (but see Kuzla, Cho, & Ernestus, 2007). Finally, a large prosodic boundary can be expected between the syntactically complete sentences in Type D, where orthography requires a period.…”

“…The Minor category was characterized by a boundary tone, but no pause, and the Word category by the absence of both a pause and a boundary tone. These criteria have been applied in other studies before (Bombien et al, 2010;Cho & McQueen, 2005;Kuzla et al, 2007;Kuzla, Ernestus, & Mitterer, 2010). The two trained native listeners then coded the boundary tones separately, by listening to the utterances and considering the f0 plots in PRAAT.…”

“…First, this duration allows us to evaluate our prosodic classification, since preboundary lengthening is a well-established correlate of prosodic structure (e.g., Wightman, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Ostendorf, & Price, 1992). If our prosodic categories appear to be good predictors of the duration of the preboundary syllable wir, we take that as external evidence for their validity (the same procedure has been applied in Kuzla et al, 2007). Second, at the same time we can test for an effect of the fortis/lenis contrast on the duration of the preceding vowel.…”

Vowel elision in casual French: The case of vowel /e/ in the word c’était

“…This study showed, among other things, that voiceless stops such as /p/ in the word support /s=pLrt/ maintain their characteristic aspiration when following [s] in cases of schwa elision, in contrast with underlying /sp/ clusters, which notably lack aspiration after the [p] release. Other connected speech phenomena now claimed to be gradient rather than categorical include nasal place assimilation in English (Byrd, 1996;Nolan, 1992, but see Ellis & Hardcastle, 2002 for evidence of categorical assimilation in some speakers), palatalization of /s/ before /j/ in English (Zsiga, 1995), and progressive voice assimilation in German (Kuzla, Cho, & Ernestus, 2007).…”