Regressive voicing assimilation: Production and perception studies

Abstract

Many languages have a phonological pattern of regressive voicing assimilation, according to which an obstruent is required to match a following obstruent in voicing (e.g. Russian, Sanskrit). This restriction on the distribution of categories has parallels in the phonetic fact that an obstruent has a longer interval of glottal pulsing when it occurs before a voiced sound than when it occurs before a voiceless sound. It is proposed that the phonological pattern arises diachronically through a reanalysis of the phonetic pattern, beginning with a tendency for listeners to identify an obstruent before another obstruent as matching the latter in voicing. This paper reports on two experiments designed to test premises of this account. A production study explores how obstruent voicing in English is affected by voicing in a following segment. A perception study explores how the identification of voicing categories is impacted by the acoustic effects of following segment context. It is found that listeners tend to identify a fricative as voiceless if it is drawn from the position before a voiceless obstruent, but that a following voiced segment has no significant effect on voicing class identification. Implications for the diachronic account of regressive voicing assimilation are discussed.

Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of change

“…We must assume that some of the tokens in these contexts that were heard by coders as voiceless actually had stem-final fricative voicing applied to them, but that this voicing was effectively “undone” by the devoicing of final /z/ and the spreading of this voicelessness to the stem-final fricative. By contrast, because there is no evidence from the literature that a voiced word-initial consonant can cause a voiceless consonant that precedes it to voice (Jansen, 2007; Myers, 2010), we have no reason to believe that any tokens in prevoiced environments that were coded as having stem-final fricative voicing actually did not have that voicing underlyingly and only gained it via assimilation. Prevoiced tokens thus give us the most accurate representation of the rate of stem-final fricative voicing in this data.…”

“…Devoicing of English /z/ is well attested in two environments: phrase-finally (e.g., leaves ‖), and before a following voiceless obstruent (e.g., leaves fall ) (Myers, 2010; Smith, 1997). This means that there may be instances in which a speaker intends to utter a form with stem-final fricative voicing, but, due to devoicing of the /z/ plural suffix followed by concomitant devoicing of the stem-final fricative that precedes it (itself due to English phonotactic restrictions on voicing agreement in final obstruent clusters [Hayes, 2011:134]), the token comes out sounding as if voicing was not applied.…”

A phonetically based metric of sound similarity

“…Data about the phonological patterns that involve the phonetic distinction provide some insight: [Àsonorant] is needed about three times as often [þsonorant] in P-base sound patterns (Mielke, in press), and of 81 instances of the class [Àsonorant] in the database, about half involve voicing or devoicing patterns. An important mechanism for the involvement of the sonorant-obstruent opposition in phonology seems to be the tendency of adjacent obstruents to affect each other's voicing specification (Stevens et al, 1992;Myers, 2010), apparently due to the difficulty of producing adjacent voiceless and non-spontaneously voiced intervals. In this case, a very specific notion of phonetic similarity is related to the mechanism of change (a particular phonetic effect involving the vocal folds), and broad measures like acoustic similarity are too blunt or too indirectly related to capture it.…”

Lexicon against Naturalness: Unnatural Gradient Phonotactic Restrictions in Tarma Quechua

“…Voicing is also dispreferred in clusters and geminates: the longer the closure, the more antagonistic articulatory forces are to voicing. Finally, the voicing feature is also universally dispreferred before another obstruent with a different value in voicing: clusters that disagree in [±voice] are universally dispreferred (Myers, 2010).…”

“…The second universal phonetic tendency that Tarma Quechua's phonotactics operate against is voicing agreement in obstruent clusters, which, again, fulfills all three conditions mentioned above. Clusters that agree in voicing are typologically very common and voicing assimilation is one of the most common processes cross-linguistically (Myers, 2010). Myers (2010) lists at least 28 such languages; this list is neither exhaustive, nor does it result from a survey.…”