Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Sonorant transparency and the complexity of voicingin Polish
Patrycja Strycharczuk
To appear in Journal of Phonetics
Abstract
Final devoicing and regressive voice assimilation have been reported toapply to obstruents in word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters in Polish. Thisphenomenon, interpreted as a case of sonorant transparency in generativephonological analyses of Polish voicing, has sparked a number of attempts toreconcile the transparency generalisation with phonological characteristics ofother laryngeal processes in Polish. This paper formulates some predictionsconcerning the surface realisation of underlying voicing values that follow fromthe sonorant transparency hypothesis, and reports on a production experimentdesigned to test these predictions. Results show, contrary to the descriptive andtheoretical literature, that word-final sonorants typically block final devoicing andvoice assimilation. The minority of cases where voicing and devoicing appear toapply as predicted by transparency are analysed using mixed-effects modelling,with a view to determining what factors influence their occurrence. Based onthe results it is argued that apparent transparency cases are best explainedas resulting from an interaction of phonological, phonetic and lexical factors,including manner of articulation, segmental duration, prosodic boundary, andword size, which are known to affect the probability of vocal fold vibration,and that systematic phonetic variation found in the data does not support thehypothesis that sonorants are transparent to laryngeal processes.
1 Introduction
Polish has been reported to display a rare form of final devoicing and voiceassimilation, where an obstruent in a word-final obstruent+sonorant clusterundergoes final devoicing, or voice assimilation if an obstruent follows in the nextword. A number of descriptive sources assert that only voiceless consonants arefound in Polish codas (Benni, 1959; Wierzchowska, 1980; Ostaszewska & Tambor,2000). In consequence, obstruents in word final obstruent+sonorant clustersundergo final devoicing even though they are not in an absolute final position.Sonorants positioned between a voiceless obstruent and a phrase boundary arereported to also undergo devoicing. Relevant examples are in (1).
1
(1) Devoicing in word-final obstruent+sonorant sequences. Examples fromBenni (1959) [IPA transcription added][vjAtr
˚] wiatr ‘wind’
[>tsEtr
˚] cedr ‘cedar tree’
[bACñ˚
] basn ‘fairy tale’
["bO.jACñ˚
] bojazn ‘fear’
Some sources mention that devoicing is not always realised. Benni (1959)notes that scientific terms ending in -ism and -yzm are often pronounced ‘morecarefully’ with a voiced obstruent. Karas & Madejowa (1977) report that therealisation of word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters varies with register. Themost colloquial forms involve deletion of the word-final sonorants, especiallyin past tense forms such as [zgAt] zgad l ‘guessed’, or [zjAt] zjad l ‘ate’. Morecareful variants have devoicing of the entire obstruent+sonorant cluster ([zgAtw
˚],
[zjAtw˚
]). However, according to Karas & Madejowa (1977), forms with avoiced obstruent in word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters ([zgAdw], [zjAdw])are on the rise, which the authors attribute to the influence of orthography onpronunciation. Sawicka (Dukiewicz & Sawicka, 1995) lists devoicing of word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters as optional. According to Sawicka, sonorantsfollowing voiceless obstruents in word-final clusters always undergo devoicing, asin [r1tm
˚] rytm ‘rhythm’. However, when the obstruent is underlyingly voiced,
it can surface as either voiced, or voiceless, as in [kAdr]/[kAtr˚
] kadr ‘personnel,Gen.’.
In addition, word-final sonorants have been reported not to block regressivevoice assimilation between flanking obstruents, as illustrated in (2) with datafrom Sawicka (1995). Sawicka’s description does not mention optionality withrespect to voice assimilation across a word-final sonorant.
(2) Voice assimilation across a sonorant. Data from Dukiewicz & Sawicka(1995)
m1ýl#bO."gA.tA mysl bogata ‘rich thought’kAtr
˚#"fji.lmu kadr filmu ‘film frame’
Finally, Rubach & Booij (1990) and Rubach (1996, 2008) report that, unlikein the cases presented in (2), a word-initial sonorant blocks voice assimilationbetween flanking obstruents, as shown in (3). The description is said to be basedon Rubach’s own observations coupled with recordings of University of Warsawstudents, but no specifics concerning the recordings are discussed.
(3) Voice assimilation blocked by an intervening word-initial sonorant. Datafrom Rubach (2008) [IPA transcription added][brAk#"rdz1] brak rdzy ‘lack of rust’[vi.dOk#"mZA.fki] widok mzawki ‘the sight of a drizzle’
Generalising from cases as the one exemplified in (1)-(3), a number of phonologists,including Bethin (1984), Gussmann (1992), and Rubach (1996, 2008), haveproposed that word-final sonorants in Polish are laryngeally transparent, i.e.
2
invisible to all categorical laryngeal processes. The generalisation has had aconsiderable impact in phonological literature, and it has been cited as evidencefor a number of theories. Gussmann (1992) uses sonorant transparency to supporta theory that final devoicing is conditioned by syllable structure, even though itis mostly observed at the Prosodic Word boundary. Scheer (2004) argues for atheory of syllable-conditioned segment licensing, which demotes syllable-structureviolating sonorants to obstruents. Finally, Rubach (1996, 2008) proposes thatsyllabification interacts with licensing-by-cue in conditioning voicing in Polish.On the basis of the asymmetry between cases like (2) and cases like (3), Rubach(1996) argues that word-initial, but not word-final sonority-violating sonorantscan license voicing contrast in the preceding obstruent. Rubach (2008) formalisesthis proposal within Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky, 2004 [1993]) byexpanding pre-sonorant faithfulness (pre-sonorant contrast licensing, cf. Steriade(1999)) with pre-vocalic faithfulness, and subjecting them to ranking.
However, the generalisations concerning occurrence of sonorant transparencyin word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters are not confirmed by the seeminglyonly phonetic study of the subject to date by Castellvı-Vives (2003). Basedon phonetic data from 4 Polish speakers, Castellvı-Vives (2003) reports thatobstruent devoicing is by no means the default way of realising voicing in word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters. Castellvı found that the underlying voicingwas most commonly realised on the surface in obstruents followed by word-final sonorants. The second most frequent variant was final sonorant deletion,followed by sonorant devoicing. The cases of sonorant transparency with adevoiced obstruent followed by a voiced sonorant were very few. Castellvı alsoreports that sonorant transparency occurred more frequently with word-finalnasals than with other sonorant subclasses, and that transparency was rare inwords ending in a glide. An asymmetry with respect to the presence or absenceof surface voicing was also observed, as transparency involving a glide was morefrequent when a voiced obstruent followed than when the following obstruent wasvoiceless. Castellvı’s findings suggest that the realisation of voicing of word-finalobstruent+sonorant clusters is more complex than previously reported, and itinvites further research into the subject.
Further motivation for a closer scrutiny of sonorant transparency in Polishcomes from the controversy surrounding voicing in Russian, where sonoranttransparency has also been reported, although the reports for Russian concerntransparency to voice assimilation only, not final devoicing, and the assimilationis said to be limited to obstruent#sonorant+obstruent sequences. The reportgoes back to Jakobson (1978), and has featured in phonological analyses ofvoicing in Russian, including Petrova & Szentgyorgyi (2004) and Rubach (2008).However, some linguists question whether there is indeed voicing in word-finalobstruents followed by a sonorant+obstruent cluster (see Shapiro (1993) foran extensive review of relevant sources on Russian). None of the publishedphonetic studies provides evidence that sonorant transparency is a categoricalphonological process in Russian. Robblee & Burton (1997) in their analysis ofobstruent+sonorant+obstruent clusters report no effect of assimilation. Kulikov(2010) has found some cases of voice assimilation between obstruents across a
3
sonorant in fast Russian speech, but argues for the assimilation to be highlyvariable, phonetic and gradient. The gradient view of sonorant transparency inRussian is also taken by Padgett (2002, 2012). Padgett (2012) presents acousticdata from a native speaker of Russian, which show a varying degree of gradientclosure voicing in word-final obstruents followed by a sonorant+obstruent cluster.In an attempt to explain the discrepancy between the data and some linguists’reports of sonorant transparency in Russian, Padgett (2012) hypothesises,following Robblee & Burton (1997), that voice assimilation across an interveningsonorant may be perceived (by language users including linguists who reportsonorant transparency to occur) even where there is no acoustic evidence forcategorical assimilation. The discrepancy between perceptual and acousticevidence in Russian is also of consequence to other languages, indicating thatreports of assimilation based on individuals’ experience and perception oflanguage may not be representative of speakers’ actual production.
This study provides an analysis of the phonetic realisation of underlyingvoicing in Polish in word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters in different morphosyntacticenvironments: at the end of a sentence (OS###), at the end of a phrase(OS##), word-finally before another obstruent (O1S#O2), as well as in word-final obstruents followed by word-initial sonorant+obstruent clusters in the nextword (O1#SO2). The strength of the prosodic boundary associated with thesyntactic boundary will be controlled by means of a number of discrete andcontinuous criteria (including presence or absence of pause, presence or absenceof boundary tones, and duration of the preceding vowel). Participants recruitedfor the study were from Warsaw (experiment 1) and central Poland (experiment2). Dialects spoken in these areas are reported to devoice word-final obstruents(as opposed to South-Western Polish dialects where final devoicing does notalways apply). The study had two aims and the experimental design was tailoredaccordingly. The first aim was to test the predictions concerning the realisationof underlying voicing values in obstruents followed by sonorants. Three specificpredictions that follow from the sonorant transparency hypothesis were tested.1) The underlying voicing contrast in obstruents in word-final clusters (OS###and OS##) is neutralised in the phonetic output. Neither underlyingly voicednor underlyingly voiceless obstruents will surface as phonetically voiced, and thetwo groups will be phonetically indistinguishable. 2) The initial obstruent in athree-member O1S#O2 cluster assimilates in voicing to the rightmost obstruentin the cluster. Thus, an underlyingly voiceless O1 followed by a voiced O2
across a sonorant will surface with more voicing than an underlyingly voiced O1
followed by a voiceless O2 across a sonorant. 3) A word-final obstruent followedby a sonorant+obstruent cluster in the next word assimilates in voicing to therightmost obstruent in the cluster. Thus, a word-final underlyingly voiceless O1
followed by a voiced O2 across a sonorant will surface with more voicing than aword-final underlyingly voiced O1 followed by a voiceless O2 across a sonorant.The first two predictions have been stated as generalisations for Polish. Thethird one follows from the hypothesis that sonorants are transparent to voiceassimilation (and have been proposed by some to occur in Russian, as discussedabove), although the case of O1#SO2 has been argued by Rubach & Booij (1990)
4
not to involve sonorant transparency. Rubach & Booij (1990) report that word-final obstruents undergo final devoicing before a sonorant in the next word, alsowhen this sonorant is followed by another obstruent.
The second aim of the study was to analyse how various phonetic factorsinfluence the phonetic realisation of underlying voicing in the environments wheresonorant transparency has been reported. As previously mentioned, devoicing ofa pre-sonorant obstruent in a final cluster is reported to be associated with thedevoicing of the final sonorant by all consulted descriptive sources. The linkis confirmed by Castellvı-Vives (2003), who reports that the cases in his datacoded as involving sonorant transparency frequently involved sonorant devoicing.Castellvı also reports the effect of manner of articulation (e.g. occurrenceof sonorant transparency is more frequent with word-final nasals). All theseeffects involved the treatment of sonorant transparency as a categorical responsevariable (transparency classified as present or absent), and the generalisationsare formed on the basis of qualitative observation coupled with ANOVA’s. Twopotential research questions emerge from these findings. First, can the influenceof phonetic factors, such as sonorant devoicing, or manner of articulation, alsobe seen on continuous response variables associated with surface realisation ofvoicing (duration of glottal pulsing, ratio of glottal pulsing duration to obstruentduration)? Second, is the surface realisation of voicing conditioned by any otherfactors? How do these individual factors contribute to the realisation of voicing,and how do they interact in a model of surface voicing of obstruents precedingsonorants?
The current study addresses these two research questions by exploring theinfluence of multiple factors on the realisation of vocal fold vibration duringobstruents in obstruent+sonorant clusters by using mixed-effects modelling. Theeffects examined in the model included the following:
1. Type of potential transparency (whether it would involve surface voicing orsurface devoicing);
2. Duration of voicing during the sonorant;
3. Sonorant’s manner of articulation (whether the sonorant was a nasal, liquidor a glide);
4. O1’s place of articulation (whether O1 was labial, coronal or dorsal);
5. O1’s manner of articulation (whether O1 was a stop or a fricative);
6. O1’s duration;
7. Size of the word.
8. Prosody-related factors including:
• Presence or absence of a following pause;
• Presence or absence of a boundary tone;
• Duration of the vowel in the final syllable;
• Syntactic characteristics of the structure in which the OS cluster wasembedded (whether it was a noun phrase, a verb phrase, an adverbphrase, or a clause).
5
The effect of underlying voicing and of sonorant’s manner of articulation wereincluded based on the finding by Castellvı-Vives (2003) that the degree to whichtransparency occurs is greater with word-final nasals, and quite rare with word-final glides, and that sonorant transparency involving glides is more commonwhen it consists in voicing than in devoicing. The presence of voicing duringthe sonorant was studied following Castellvı’s findings, and previous descriptivereports that sonorant transparency frequently involves sonorant devoicing. Theinclusion of the remaining factors was motivated by literature reports of theirinteractions with phonetic and phonological voicing. Duration of glottal pulsingduring closure has been found to vary with place of articulation in stops, beinggreater in labials, than in coronals and velars (Keating, 1984). The degree of vocalfold vibration is also sensitive to manner of articulation of the potential voicingtarget. There is a typological tendency for voiced fricatives to be much lessfrequent than voiced stops (Ladefoged & Maddieson, 1996). Ohala (1983) arguesthat this asymmetry is due to inherent aerodynamic differences involved in theproduction of stops and fricatives. Specifically, fricative voicing is particularlydifficult to sustain, as noted by Ohala (1983) and Ohala & Sole (2010), becausethe production of frication noise requires high intraoral pressure. This conflictswith aerodynamic constraints on voicing, as vocal fold vibration is initiated andmaintained in the presence of a transglottal pressure drop that involves lowerpressure above than below the glottis (Baer, 1975; Stevens, 1998). Aerodynamicfactors are also of relevance with respect to the interaction of obstruent durationand surface voicing, particularly in the case of stops. Supraglottal pressurerises naturally during obstruent articulation (especially occlusion), so voicingis expected to cease at some point during obstruent articulation (Westbury &Keating, 1986). The effect of word size was included following the reportsby Wedel (2002) that short (monosyllabic) words resist voicing alternations inTurkish. This pattern is attributed by Wedel (2002) to neighbourhood density.Short words typically have dense neighbourhoods, i.e. they differ by only onefeature/segment from other existing words. Resistance to alternation in denseneighbourhoods is conditioned by lexical access, as argued by Wedel (2002)(though cf. Becker & Nevins (2009) for counter-arguments). Prosodic effectson the degree of coarticulation have been previously reported by Cho (2004)and Kuzla et al. (2007). Cho (2004) reports that the extent of vowel-to-vowelcoarticulation in American English is influenced by prosody with relatively lesscoarticulation in stronger prosodic positions. A similar prosodic influence wasfound by Kuzla et al. (2007) for progressive devoicing of German fricatives,which was more advanced when the intervening prosodic boundary was relativelyweaker.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents the resultsfrom a pilot experiment, designed to test whether the underlying voicing contrastis neutralised in pre-sonorant stops at the end of an utterance. Section 3introduces results from an experiment designed to test the predictions of thesonorant transparency hypothesis with respect to the realisation of underlyingvoice specifications in OS##, O1S#O2, and O1#SO2 sequences, where O1 andO2 conflict in their underlying voicing. In the second part of this section, glottal
6
pulsing duration and ratio of glottal pulsing duration to obstruent duration(henceforth, voicing ratio) are analysed in a series of mixed-effects models appliedto two subsets of data: 1) cases where the sonorant transparency hypothesispredicts surface devoicing of an underlyingly voiced obstruent, and 2) cases wherethe sonorant transparency hypothesis predicts surface voicing of an underlyinglyvoiceless obstruent. Section 4 goes on to argue that the attested cases ofrealisation consistent with the sonorant transparency hypothesis are marginal,and that they involve effects which are not predicted if sonorant transparency isconsidered to be a uniform phonological phenomenon. Section 5 concludes.
2 Sonorant transparency and final
devoicing. Pilot study
The pilot study was was set up as a preliminary investigation into the obstruentvoicing in the pre-sonorant position word-finally. The aim of the experimentwas to establish whether obstruents in word-final OS### clusters have distinctvoicing targets. 6 female native speakers of Polish, aged 20-24, read tworepetitions of test stimuli. All the participants were originally from Warsawor the surrounding area, and they were all living in Warsaw at the time of theexperiment. They were naive as to the purpose of the experiment, and were notpaid for their participation.
2.1 Materials and method
The test items were 10 words including word-final stop+sonorant sequences at theend of an utterance (OS###): /tr/, /dr/, /pr/, /br/, /tw/, /dw/, /kw/, /gw/.The test items were embedded in meaningful Polish sentences, as illustrated in(4).
(4) Sample stimulus sentencePrognoza przepowiada silny wiatr.‘The forecast predicts strong wind.’
The test items were paired to correspond in the size of the word, the final sonorant,the preceding stop’s place of articulation and, where possible, the height of thepreceding vowel. The full list of items is in the appendix.
The data were collected as a part of a larger study on the realisation of word-final obstruents in various segmental contexts. Some other data collected in thestudy were also analysed post hoc in addition to the data from OS### sequences.This was done in order to assess the potential effect of using written stimuli inthe experimental design. The voicing distinction in Polish is reflected in theorthography, and since the stimuli were presented to the speakers in writing,voicing contrast might have been triggered by the spelling. An objection of thiskind has been raised by numerous phoneticians in their criticism of incompleteneutralisation findings, including Jassem & Richter (1989) for Polish, who argue
7
that incomplete final neutralisation in Polish, as reported by Slowiaczek &Dinnsen (1985), may be partially due to the use of written stimuli in phoneticexperiments. The potential effect of orthography is analysed here based on word-final stops followed by a sonorant. These items, henceforth referred to as controlitems, involved 14 tokens of word-final coronal stops (/t/, /d/) followed by asonorant (/r/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /w/, /j/, /o/) in the following word. These itemswere embedded in meaningful Polish sentences, as illustrated in (5).
(5) Kryzys gospodarczy powoduje nawrot leku w spo leczenstwie.The economic crisis triggers a return of anxiety in the society.
The sentences were presented to the participants on cards, one at a time. Thestimuli were randomised by re-shuffling for each participant.
The recordings were made in a sound-treated room, using a Behringer-B1condenser microphone. The speakers were positioned 30 cm away from themicrophone and instructed to read the sentences at a comfortable rate. Theywere encouraged to correct themselves if they made a mistake. The recordingswere sampled at 44.1 kHz. Segmentation and acoustic analysis were carried outin Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2010) on a 5 ms Gaussian window (spectrogrambandwidth 260 Hz). Boundaries were inserted manually based on visual analysisof the spectrograms. Altogether 120 utterances were recorded (2 repetitions of10 test stimuli and 14 control stimuli pronounced by 6 subjects). 8 utteranceswere excluded due to deletions, mispronunciations, or segmentation difficulties,leaving 280 test utterances for analysis.
The following acoustic measurements were taken. All of the measurementsrelated to stops and vowels had been previously recorded in studies on the voicingcontrast in Polish, including Keating (1980), Slowiaczek & Dinnsen (1985),Jassem & Richter (1989), as well as in studies on laryngeal neutralisation in otherlanguages, including Fourakis & Iverson (1984), Port & O’Dell (1985), Charles-Luce (1985), and Barry (1988).
1. Duration of glottal pulsing during closure. The presence of vocal foldvibration has been shown to be a primary acoustic correlate of the voicingcontrast in true voice languages, including Polish (Keating, 1980). Voicedsegments in Polish are typically realised with longer glottal pulsing, bothin absolute terms and relative to closure duration, than their voicelesscounterparts. Duration of glottal pulsing was measured manually basedon the presence of the voicing bar on the spectrogram and periodicity in thewaveform. Absence of voicing was coded as 0.
2. Stop closure duration. The voicing contrast has been shown to influencethe duration of stop closure in some languages, where word-medial andword-final phonologically voiced stops have a shorter closure phase thanphonologically voiceless stops (Chen, 1970; Kluender et al., 1988). Althoughthis effect does not seem to have been observed for Polish, closure durationwas recorded to help contextualise the measurements of the duration ofglottal pulsing in terms of duration of occlusion. Closure was measured
8
manually, based on to be the presence of low acoustic energy between thepreceding vowel and the following stop release.
3. Vowel duration. Lengthening of the preceding vowel has been observedbefore phonologically voiced stops for a number of languages (Peterson &Lehiste, 1960; Chen, 1970; Kluender et al., 1988). Slowiaczek & Dinnsen(1985) report to have found this effect for Polish, but their finding was notreplicated by Jassem & Richter (1989). Keating (1980) reports that durationof the preceding vowel does not correlate with the voicing contrast. Vowelduration was measured manually. The beginning of the vowel was placedat the beginning of the formant structure for vowels preceded by obstruent.For vowels preceded by sonorants, the initial boundary was placed at theonset of the formant steady state. The boundary between the vowel andthe following stop was placed at the onset of low acoustic energy at higherfrequencies.
4. Duration of the burst. Phonologically voiced stops have been found to havea weaker and shorter burst than phonologically voiceless stops (Fischer-Jørgensen, 1954; Slis & Cohen, 1969), although the effect in Polish is saidto be fairly weak (Keating, 1980). Burst was identified based on the presenceof high frequency noise following the closure phase of the stop. Absence ofburst was coded as 0.
5. Duration of voicing during the sonorant. This measurement was taken toinvestigate whether there is a correlation between obstruent and sonorantdevoicing in OS## clusters, as reported by Castellvı-Vives (2003). Sonorantvoicing was identified based on the presence of periodicity in the waveformand the presence of a voicing bar at the bottom of a spectrogram. Absenceof voicing was coded as 0.
2.2 Results
An initial exploration of the data already shows that stops can surface as voicedwhen followed by a word-final sonorant. Figure 1 illustrates a spectrogram of thepair: kadr and wiatr by speaker W3. There is a clear voicing bar extending fromthe vowel, through the closure and release phase of the stop in kadr, into the finalsonorant. In comparison, the voicing tail from the vowel in wiatr is very short,leaving most of the stop voiceless. Voiced realisations, such as the one shown inFigure 1 were found to be very common for the studied speakers.
The recoverability of underlying voicing in OS### sequences was analysedwith a generalised linear mixed-effects model, using the lme4 package (Bates &Maechler, 2009) in R (R Development Core Team, 2005), version 2.13.1. Whetherthe underlying voicing value could be recovered from the phonetic signal wasthe response variable in the model, and the effect of speaker was treated asrandom. The model achieved the best fit of the data with two fixed effects:duration of glottal pulsing, and duration of closure. A summary of the modelis in Table 1. A voiceless underlying specification was more likely in obstruentswith shorter duration of glottal pulsing (B=-0.11 (SE=0.02), z=-5.44, p<0.001),
9
d r t r
Figure 1: Realisation of utterance-final /dr/ and /tr/ by speaker W3
Table 1: Summary of the fixed part of a generalised linear mixed-effects modelpredicting the likelihood of the obstruent being underlyingly voiceless. Experiment1.
Term β SE z p(Intercept) -0.07 1.34 -0.05 0.960Glottal pulsing duration -0.11 0.02 -5.44 <0.001Closure duration 0.04 0.02 2.73 0.006
and longer duration of closure (B=0.04 (SE=0.02), z=2.73, p=0.006). A modelwhich also involved the effect of preceding vowel duration and duration of burstdid not achieve a significantly better fit of the data (log-likelihood test: χ2=2.98,p=0.22), and neither of the additional effects was significant (vowel duration: B=-0.03 (SE=0.02), z=-1.53, p=0.12; burst duration: B=0.01 (SE=0.01), z=1.13,p=0.26).
The results of mixed-effects modelling show that the underlying voicing valueis not neutralised on the surface, as the presence of underlying voicing is associatedwith an increase in the duration of vocal fold vibration, and a decrease in closureduration. The surface contrast between underlyingly voiced and underlyinglyvoiceless obstruents in the current data was found to be quite robust. Boxplotsin Figure 2 illustrate the difference in the realisation of underlying voicing. Thereis a large difference between the two groups in terms of glottal pulsing duration,with the median difference of 56.41 ms. The difference is even more robust in
10
voiced voiceless
020
4060
80
Underlying voicing
Dur
atio
n of
glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng (m
s)
voiced voiceless
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
Underlying voicingV
oici
ng ra
tio
Figure 2: Boxplots of glottal pulsing duration (left) and voicing ratio (right) as afunction of the underlying voicing value in OS### sequences in the pilot study.
terms of voicing ratio, i.e. glottal pulsing duration divided by closure duration,with the median difference of 1.
In order to establish whether the underlying voicing contrast is neutralisedin O#S sequences, a generalised linear mixed-effects model was fitted to thecontrol data, i.e. tokens of word-final coronal stops followed by sonorants inthe next word. The effect of speakers was analysed as random. Four fixedeffects were considered in the modelling: duration of glottal pulsing, durationof closure, duration of the preceding vowel, and the duration of burst. Nosubset of these four predictors yielded a model with any significant fixed effects.In a model based on glottal pulsing and closure duration alone, analogousto the model described above for the OS### sequences, neither the effectof glottal pulsing duration, nor the effect of closure duration was significant(glottal pulsing duration: B=5.43 (SE=18.89), z=0.29, p=0.77; closure duration:B=1.54 (SE=11.83), z=0.13, p=0.9). The fit of the model did not improvesignificantly upon adding further fixed effects of vowel and burst duration (log-likelihood test: χ2=4.81, p=0.09), and neither of the added effects was significant(vowel duration: B=22.75 (SE=16.12), z=1.41, p=0.16; burst duration: B=2.07(SE=15.77), z=0.13, p=0.9).
This result shows that the underlying voicing value in the obstruents in O#Ssequences is not associated with any effects which where significant in the caseof OS### sequences. Thus, the underlying voicing contrast appears to beneutralised along these dimensions. Neutralisation in terms of glottal pulsingduration and voicing ratio is illustrated in the boxplots in Figure 3. In addition,
11
the underlying voicing value was not found to be significantly correlated withother potential acoustic exponents of voicing, such as vowel duration, or durationof the burst. Thus, as far as the acoustic predictors analysed in the current studyare concerned, the underlying voicing contrast was neutralised by the participantsin word-final stops followed by a sonorant in the next word.
voiced voiceless
0.00
0.01
0.02
0.03
0.04
0.05
Underlying voicing
Dur
atio
n of
glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng (m
s)
voiced voiceless
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
Underlying voicing
Voi
cing
ratio
Figure 3: Boxplots of glottal pulsing duration (left) and voicing ratio (right) a functionof the underlying voicing value in C#S sequences in the pilot study.
The results of modelling the underlying voicing value in obstruent in O#Ssequences suggest that using written stimuli in the experimental set-up does notnecessarily involve lack of neutralisation in the coda, and so the contrast foundfor obstruents in OS### sequences need not be an artefact of the experimentaldesign. The evidence is indirect, as the prosodic boundaries were not strictlycontrolled for. The test tokens were at the Utterance boundary, while thecontrol items were Prosodic Word-final. However, if anything, more devoicing(and hence less contrast) is expected with stronger prosodic boundaries, due tothe open position of the glottis at the end of the utterance in anticipation ofbreathing1. This type of prosodic effect on devoicing is also reported by Tucker& Warner (2010), who found that for final nasals in Romanian devoicing occursmore frequently and to a greater extent at the end of an utterance than at theend of a word. In light of these findings, if final devoicing occurs in O#S, it isequally or even more likely to occur in OS###, as far as prosody is concerned,and the effect of orthography is not expected to vary between different types ofitems for the same speakers in the same experiment. Thus, the fact the devoicing
1I owe this observation to one of the reviewers.
12
is typically not observed in OS### tokens suggests that devoicing is blocked bythe final sonorant.
2.2.1 Devoicing cases
From the data presented so far it follows that obstruent devoicing is not thedefault, or even the prevailing realisation of the obstruent in a OS### cluster.However, some devoicing cases were found in the data. To provide the reader witha rough frequency estimate of the potential transparency cases, all the obstruenttokens in the data were classified as either voiced or voiceless on the surface.Classification was done by means of k -means clustering based on two vectors:glottal pulsing duration, and closure duration2. The data points were assignedinto two groups such that the sum of squares from points to the assigned clustercentres was minimised using the Hartigan-Wong algorithm (Hartigan & Wong,1979), as illustrated in Figure 4.
40 60 80 100 120 140
020
4060
80
C1 duration (ms)
Voi
cing
dur
atio
n (m
s)
Cluster12
Figure 4: Results of k -mean clustering of pre-sonorant stops in OS### environment.Pilot study
Out of the 60 underlyingly voiced stops, 49 were assigned to cluster 1 (centredaround full glottal pulsing during closure), with the remaining 11 tokens assignedto cluster 2 (centred around 0 ms of glottal pulsing). 8 out of 11 stops assignedto cluster 2 were produced by the same speaker, W2, and they were all producedwith creaky voice extending over the utterance-final rhyme, as illustrated in theleft panel of Figure 5.
2These two variables were selected based on their high significance in mixed-effects modelling.
13
k ɑ d r ts ɛ n ɛ
Figure 5: Creaky voice realised by speaker W2 utterance-finally. The left panelrepresents the speaker’s realisation of an utterance final kadr ‘personnel, Gen.Pl.’. Theright panel represents the speaker’s realisation of utterance-final cene ‘price, Acc. Sg.’
As the right panel in Figure 5 shows, W2 was also found to produce creakyvoice at the end of utterances involving sequences other than stop+sonorant. Thisphonetic strategy can be interpreted as boundary marking by this speaker, notlimited to utterance-final stop+sonorant sequences, and laryngeal neutralisationappears to be little more than a side-effect of utterance-final creaky voice. Thishypothesis is further corroborated by the observation that whenever W2 did notproduce creaky voice over the whole phrase-final stop+sonorant sequence, shewould voice the pre-sonorant stop, as illustrated by the spectrogram in Figure 6.
Based on the occasional stop voicing in the pre-sonorant position by speakerW2, it can be argued that her pre-sonorant stops have distinct voicing targets.However, these targets are frequently neutralised on the surface due to the tensingof vocal folds when creaky voice is produced for boundary marking.
2.3 Summary
The method used detected a very salient voicing contrast in stops followed bya sonorant at the end of a word. Only one out of six speakers was found toneutralise the contrast in most cases, which might be just a side effect of thespeaker’s tendency to produce creaky voice at the end of the utterance. Whatis more, even the production of this particular speaker involved voiced stopsin the pre-sonorant position, which points to the conclusion that underlyingly
14
k ɔ b r
Figure 6: Voicing of a pre-sonorant obstruent in utterance-final kobr ‘cobra snake,Gen.Pl.’ by speaker W2
voiced and underlyingly voiceless stops followed by a word-final sonorant differin their surface voicing targets. Experiment 1 provided also some validation ofthe elicitation method used. The speakers were found to neutralise the voicingdistinction in stops followed by a sonorant in the next word, which indicates thatthe non-neutralisation in stops in word-final stop + sonorant clusters was unlikelyto be due to the use of written stimuli.
3 Experiment on sonorant transparency to
final devoicing and voice assimilation
The pilot study data on OS### sequences question do not confirm the literaturereports which state that pre-sonorant stops typically undergo final devoicingin this position. The data also show that stops in word-final stop+sonorantclusters do have distinct voicing targets, which is expected to counteract voiceassimilation. In order to test whether voice assimilation can occur across asonorant, another production experiment was conducted. 8 native speakers ofPolish participated in the experiment: 6 females aged 39-53, and 2 males aged28 and 32. All the speakers came from central Poland. The purpose of theexperiment was not explained to the speakers until after the recording. Theparticipants were not paid.
15
3.1 Materials and method
Three types of test items were used in the study 1) word-final obstruent+sonorantsequences (OS##); 2) word-final obstruent+sonorant sequences followed by anobstruent in the next word (O1S#O2); and 3) word-final stops, followed by wordinitial sonorant-obstruent sequences (O1#SO2). Sample test items are in (6), forthe full list of items see the Appendix.
(6) Sample test items
Condition 1 (OS##): zubr ‘bison, Nom.Sg.’
Condition 2 (O1S#O2): zubr siedzia l ‘the bison was sitting’
Condition 3 (O1#SO2): kwiat rdestu ‘water pepper flower’
An equal number of words with voiced and voiceless stops was used acrossall test items. The same set of tokens was used in Condition 1 (in the devoicingcontext) and in Condition 2 (assimilation context). The test items in both of theseconditions were paired to correspond in word size, and the place and mannerof the obstruent+sonorant sequence, across the two voicing categories (e.g.zubr siedzia l - Cypr wiosna). Place and manner of the obstruent and sonorantwere systematically varied, in order to test whether a potential effect in the degreeof voicing or devoicing in the obstruent. The size of the word containing thepotential devoicing/assimilation undergoer was systematically varied for the samereason. Lexical restrictions did not allow for matching of the preceding vowel,or controlling for this factor in any other way. In the assimilation contexts allpotential assimilation undergoers differed in the underlying voicing specificationsfrom the triggers, i.e. O1 and O2 always conflicted in their underlying voicingvalues.
Unlike in the first experiment, a standard carrier sentence (7) was used in orderto eliminate confounds from syntactic structure, sentence length, and provide abetter comparison of durations.
(7) The carrier sentencePowiedz jeszcze raz.‘Say one more time.’
The recordings were made in a quiet room on a Marantz PMD 670 SolidState Recorder, using a head-wearable microphone (AKG C420). The stimuliwere presented to the speakers in a semi-random order (excluding immediaterepetitions) on a computer screen, one stimulus at a time. The experimentwas self-timed: the speakers were told they could complete the experiment attheir own pace, and they were encouraged to correct themselves if they madean error. The speakers read two repetitions of each test item. Altogether 832utterances were recorded (2 repetitions of 52 stimuli pronounced by 8 speakers).Many speakers had trouble reading the items fluently, especially the very complexconsonant clusters in the assimilation context. A rather large number of 98utterances had to be discarded, due to the disfluencies, reading errors, and pauseswithin the test items. This left 724 utterances for phonetic and statistical analysis.
16
The phonetic analysis followed the same procedure as established for the pilotstudy. Spectrograms were labelled manually in Praat, and acoustic measurementswere made based on the inserted boundaries. The following measurements weremade for pre-sonorant stops, following the pilot study.
1. Duration of glottal pulsing into stop closure;
2. Stop closure duration;
3. Duration of the preceding vowel;
4. Duration of the burst.
For fricatives the following measurements were made.
1. Duration of glottal pulsing during the fricative. Analogically to the case ofstops, increased glottal pulsing is expected to mark the surface voicing of africative.
2. Duration of the frication noise. Fricative duration has been shown to bean exponent of voicing in a number of languages, including Dutch (Slis &Cohen, 1969) and English (Crystal & House, 1988). Voiced fricatives tendto surface as shorter than voiceless fricatives. Stevens et al. (1992) have alsofound a duration effect on the perception of voice in fricatives, where shorterfrication noise brings about the perception of voicing in listeners (Forrez,1966; Stevens et al., 1992) r
3. Duration of the preceding vowel.
For both, stops and fricatives, voicing ratio was calculated, based on theduration of glottal pulsing into closure, or into frication. In addition, the followingmeasurements were made for the sonorants following the obstruents in clusters(both, post-stop and post-fricative).
1. Duration of voicing during the sonorant.
2. f0 at 10 ms into the sonorant.
3. f1 at 10 ms into the sonorant. The f0 and f1 measurements were recorded,following the reports by House & Fairbanks (1953) and Kingston & Diehl(1994), inter alia, that f0 and f1 are relatively lower following voicedconsonants. The effect is most prominent following the obstruent, and fadesover time.
The vowel durations measurements were complicated by the presence of apreceding onglide in the context of a palatalised consonant (e.g. in /vjAtr/‘wind’.The presence of a glide made it difficult to precisely determine the onset of thevowel, and it was not possible to include the glide in the duration measurements,since the palatalisation had not been controlled for. In the light of these problems,vowel duration measurements were discarded.
In addition to the continuous phonetic measurements related to voicing, anumber of prosodic factors were transcribed for the data from experiment 2.The most likely prosodic realisations of the test items in Condition 1 involved
17
a following phrase boundary under the definition of a prosodic pause as asequence of one or more pitch accents and a boundary tone (Pierrehumbert,1980). Previous work on Polish shows that phonetic cues to prosodic boundariesinclude pre-boundary lengthening of the final syllable’s nucleus, a pitch movementcorresponding to a boundary tone, and a following pause (Demenko, 2000;Francuzik et al., 2002). Relatively stronger phrase boundaries are signalled bythe co-occurrence of two or more cues, especially involving the presence of afollowing pause. In contrast, absence of either pause or a boundary tone signals alower-level prosodic boundary corresponding to that of a Prosodic Word. The testitems in Conditions 2 and 3 were most likely to be realised with the O1SO2 clusterstraddling a Prosodic Word boundary (O1S#O2, or O1#SO2). However, sincethe exact prosodic realisation of a string of speech cannot be predicted basedon syntax alone (Shattuck-Hufnagel & Turk, 1996), phonetic cues to prosodicboundaries were annotated for the data, including the presence or absence ofa following pause and a boundary tone. Pause was defined as a period of lowacoustic energy of at least 10 ms. Boundary tone was defined as pitch movementfollowing the pitch accent diagnosable by a rise (or fall) in f0 through the post-tonic syllable towards an apparent H (or L) target aligned at the right edge ofthat word. In 54 cases it was impossible to determine the presence or absence ofa boundary tone due to final rhyme devoicing and absence of f0. Given previousfindings on pre-boundary lengthening of the vocalic nucleus, vowel durationwas also considered in the analysis of the test items’ prosodic realisation. Inaddition, since prosody may also be influenced by syntactic factors, basic syntacticcharacteristics were transcribed for all test items (whether the item was a nounphrase, a verb phrase, an adjectival phrase, or a clause).
3.2 Results
3.2.1 Deletions
The acoustic analysis of the data reveals a substantial number of cases wherea word-final sonorant in an obstruent+sonorant cluster is elided, leaving noacoustic or auditory trace3. As previously noted by Castellvı-Vives (2003), it isnot uncommon for a sonorant to be elided from a word-final obstruent+sonorantcluster, but in the absence of a sonorant it is incorrect to talk about ‘transparency’.76 cases of deletion were counted in the current data altogether, accounting for10.73% of all utterances. No deletion cases occurred in Condition 3 (i.e. when thesonorant was word-initial), so the 76 attested deletion cases make up 12.31% of allCondition 1 and Condition 2 utterances. A generalised linear mixed-effects modelwas fitted to the data from conditions 1 and 2 pooled together. The dependentvariable was whether or not the sonorant was deleted. The effects of speaker anditem were treated as random. The predictors considered in the model includedcondition, the size of the word (monosyllabic, disyllabic, or trisyllabic), as well
3Whether or not a residual sonorant gesture is present in such cases is a question for futurearticulatory research.
18
Table 2: Summary of the fixed part of a generalised linear mixed-effects modelpredicting whether or not the word-final sonorant in an OS cluster would undergodeletion. The intercept corresponds to a word-final glide in a monosyllabic word inCondition 1.
Term Level β SE z p(Intercept) -3.65 0.84 -4.32 <0.001Condition 2 2.18 0.44 5.00 <0.001Word size disyllabic 1.62 0.51 3.16 0.002Word size trisyllabic 2.02 0.92 2.20 0.028Manner nasal -2.44 0.85 -2.87 0.004Manner rhotic -2.83 0.58 -4.85 <0.001
as the manner of articulation of the following sonorant (glide, nasal, or rhotic).The model’s summary is in Table 2.
The occurrence of deletions was greater in Condition 2 than in Condition 1(B=2.18 (SE=0.44), z=5.00, p<0.001), meaning that word-final sonorants in anobstruent+sonorant cluster were more likely to delete when an obstruent followed.The likelihood of deletion also increased with the size of the word. Deletionwas less likely to occur in monosyllabic than in disyllabic (B=1.62 (SE=0.51),z=3.16, p=0.002), or trisyllabic (B=2.02 (SE=0.92), z=2.20, p=0.028) words.In addition, glides were more likely to delete than nasals (B=-2.44 (SE=0.85),z=-2.87, p=0.004), or rhotics (B=-2.83 (SE=0.58), z=-4.85, p<0.001). It is notclear whether this last finding is due to manner of articulation, or morphosyntacticfactors, since all test items with word-final glides where verbs, where the glidewas a past tense marker. In contrast, the test items ending with nasals or rhoticswere all nouns.
3.2.2 Prosodic realisation
Condition 1 had been predicted to typically trigger a phrase boundary, characterisedby the presence of a boundary tone, presence of a following phrase, or both. Apause following the test item was found in 134 cases. In addition, a boundary tonewas identified in 172 Condition 1 items that did not have a following pause. 16 ofthe Condition 1 test items were characterised by the absence of either boundarytone or a following pause. These 16 cases involved a following word boundaryunder the definition provided above, whereas all the remaining pronunciationsinvolved a phrase boundary of varying strength. The phrase-final items wereassociated with lengthening of the vowel in the final syllable. A t-test comparisonof the vowel length in Condition 1 depending on the presence or absence of aphrase boundary showed a difference in means of 38.36 ms, which was significantat t=-11.49, p <0.001.
Conditions 2 and 3 had been predicted to typically trigger a word boundary,defined as the absence of a following phrase or a boundary tone. Test items
19
Table 3: Summary of the fixed part of a generalised linear mixed-effects modelpredicting the likelihood of the obstruent being underlyingly voiceless. Condition 1.
Term β SE z p(Intercept) 1.36 0.80 1.69 0.090Glottal pulsing duration -0.09 0.01 -8.26 <0.001f0 0.01 0.003 2.68 0.007
where a pause intervened between potential assimilation trigger and undergoerhad been previously discarded as disfluencies. Out of the remaining 388 items,305 showed no boundary tone, which was consistent with the presence of a wordboundary. A boundary tone was found in 53 cases from Conditions 2 and 3, whilethe remaining 30 cases were not coded for the presence or absence of a final pitchmovement, due to devoicing. The presence of a boundary tone (and an associatedphrase boundary under the current definition) was again correlated with vowellengthening. The difference in means between vowels depending on the presenceor absence of a boundary tone equalled 11.63 ms and was significant at t=-2.37,p=0.02.
3.2.3 Predicting the value of underlying voicing
Predictions concerning the recoverability of underlying voicing were tested in aseries of generalised mixed-effects models, where the dependent variable was theunderlying voicing of the pre-sonorant obstruent (voiced vs. voiceless), with theeffect of speaker treated as random. Three separate models were fitted for thethree experimental condition. In all models the effect of speaker was treated asrandom. The fixed predictors considered in the modelling included: O1 duration(i.e. duration of closure or frication), the duration of glottal pulsing during closureor frication, f0 at 10 ms after the offset of the obstruent, and f1 at 10 ms afterthe offset of the obstruent.
Condition 1 data were used to test whether the underlying voicing value of apre-sonorant obstruent followed by a phrase boundary can be recovered from theacoustic signal. Underlying specification for voicing was found to be associatedwith increased glottal pulsing (B=-0.091 (SE=0.01), z=-8.26, p<0.001) and f0lowering following the obstruent (B=0.01 (SE=0.003), z=2.68, p=0.07). The fitof the model did not improve significantly upon adding further predictors such asobstruent duration (log-likelihood test: χ2=2.91, p=0.09), or f1 value followingthe obstruent (χ2=0.08, p= 0.78). Neither O1 duration, nor the f1 measurereached the significance of 0.05 when added to the model, and neither of thesepredictors was retained in the final model (summarised in Table 3).
This result replicates the result of the pilot study: the underlying voicingcontrast in word-final obstruent followed by a sonorant and a phrase boundaryis mostly recoverable. The difference is also rather robust, as illustrated in theleft panel of Figure 7. Although there are outliers, which will be discussed inSection 3.3, the general tendency is for underlyingly voiced stops to surface with
20
decidedly longer glottal pulsing.
voiced voiceless
050
100
150
Underlying voicing
Dur
atio
n of
glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng (m
s)
voiced voiceless0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
Underlying voicing
Voi
cing
ratio
Figure 7: Duration of glottal pulsing and voicing ratio as a function of underlyingvoicing in OS sequences in Condition 1.
Condition 2 involved tokens of word-final obstruent+sonorant sequencesfollowed by an obstruent in the next word. The tokens were constructed in such away that the two obstruents flanking a sonorant would conflict in their underlyingvoice specifications. From the point of view of sonorant transparency, it wouldbe expected that the first obstruent in the cluster will assimilate in voicing to thesecond obstruent, reversing its underlying voice specification.
(8) Predictions for the outcome of Condition 2 from the perspective ofsonorant transparencySequence Prediction
/br#C/ [prC]/pr#v/ [brv]
A generalised mixed linear model was fitted to the data from Condition 2. Amodel including two fixed effects: that of glottal pulsing duration and f0 at10ms after the offset achieved a better fit of the data than a model based onglottal pulsing alone (log-likelihood test: χ2=31.94, p< 0.001). According to themodel based on these two effects, glottal pulsing was a highly significant predictor(B=-0.05 (SE=0.007), z=-6.31, p<0.001), but f0 was not significant (B=-0.0009(SE=0.003), z=-0.31, p=0.76). Adding further fixed effects (O1 duration and f1)did not significantly improve the fit of the model, and neither of the added effectswas significant. The final model is summarised in Table 4.
Increased glottal pulsing was associated with underlying voicing, as indicated
21
Table 4: Summary of the fixed part of a generalised linear mixed-effects modelpredicting the likelihood of the obstruent being underlyingly voiceless. The modelwas run on the data from Condition 2.
Term β SE z p(Intercept) 3.57 0.67 5.33 9<0.001Glottal pulsing duration -0.05 0.007 -6.31 <0.01f0 -0.0009 0.003 -0.31 0.76
by the negative value of the β coefficient for glottal pulsing duration. Boxplots inFigure 8 illustrate surface voicing associated with underlyingly voiced obstruentsin terms of glottal pulsing duration and voicing ratio. Similarly to Condition 1,decidedly more glottal pulsing (both in absolute terms and relative to obstruentduration) is found in underlyingly voiced obstruents than in the underlyinglyvoiceless obstruents, contrary to the predictions stated in (8).
voiced voiceless
020
4060
80100
120
140
Underlying voicing
Dur
atio
n of
glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng (m
s)
voiced voiceless
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
Underlying voicing
Voi
cing
ratio
Figure 8: Duration of glottal pulsing and voicing ratio as a function of underlyingvoicing in pre-sonorant obstruents followed by another obstruent in the next word(Condition 2)
The test items in Condition 3 contained word final obstruents followed bysonorant+obstruent sequences in the next word. The rightmost obstruent inthe three-member cluster conflicted in its underlying voicing with the leftmostobstruent in the cluster in all the cases. A generalised mixed-effects model wasfitted to the data in Condition 3 modelling the recoverability of the underlyingvoicing contrast. No subset of the four predictors (O1 duration, duration of glottal
22
pulsing during closure or frication, f0 at 10 ms after the offset of the obstruent, andf1 at 10 ms after the offset of the obstruent) yielded any significant fixed effects.Unlike in Conditions 1 and 2, an equal amount of vocal fold vibration was foundfor underlyingly voiced and underlyingly voiceless obstruents, as illustrated inFigure 9.
voiced voiceless
020
4060
80100
Underlying voicing
Dur
atio
n of
glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng (m
s)
voiced voiceless
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
1.0
Underlying voicing
Voi
cing
ratio
Figure 9: Duration of glottal pulsing and voicing ratio as a function of underlyingvoicing in obstruents followed by an SO cluster in the next word (condition 3)
This observation confirms the report by Rubach (1996, 2008) that theunderlying voicing contrast in obstruents in the word-final position tends tobe neutralised on the surface. The neutralisation effect is also important forvalidating the method. The speakers were found to neutralise the underlyingvoicing contrast despite the contrast being represented in writing suggesting againthat the contrast preservation in Condition 1 and 2 is unlikely to be due to theuse of written stimuli.
3.3 Modelling the realisation of obstruent+sonorantclusters
The statistical results presented in the previous section do not confirm thegeneralisation that word-final sonorants behave transparently by allowing obstruentsin word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters to undergo final devoicing. Neither dothey confirm that the leftmost obstruent in a three-member obstruent+sonorant+obstruentcluster tends to assimilate in voicing to the rightmost obstruent, regardless ofwhether there is a word boundary following the first obstruent (Condition 2), orthe sonorant (Condition 3). However, the variation found in the data signals that
23
no simple generalisation can accurately capture the data. This section estimatesthe number of potential transparency cases, and explores some trends found inthe realisation of surface voicing in pre-sonorant obstruents in the current datasetusing a series of mixed-effects regression models.
3.3.1 Potential transparency cases
Following the procedure previously used for the pilot study data, all the obstruenttokens from experiment 2 were classified as either voiced or voiceless on thesurface. Classification was done by means of k -means clustering based ontwo vectors: voicing duration and O1 duration4. The classification results areillustrated in Figure 10.
50 100 150
050
100
150
C1 duration (ms)
Glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng d
urat
ion
(ms)
Cluster12
Figure 10: Classification results of k -means clustering based on glottal pulsing durationand obstruent duration.
As illustrated in the scatterplot in Figure 10, 261 tokens were classified asa part of cluster 1, interpreted as voiced, with the median voicing ratio of 1,and the minimum voicing ratio of 0.54. 190 tokens were classified as a part ofcluster 2, interpreted as voiceless, with the median voicing ratio of 0.21 and, andthe maximum voicing ratio of 0.59. The scatterplot in Figure 10 makes it clearthat there are numerous intermediate cases in the distribution of both voicingand obstruent duration. Consequently, imposing a two-way distinction on thedata is necessarily arbitrary, and the numerical data obtained on the basis ofthe classification should not be treated as conclusive statistics about how oftentransparency occurs. The classification is intended solely as a tentative way ofestimating in what percentage of cases the sonorant transparency hypothesis can
4It would have been possible to include more voice-related measurements, such as f0 and f1 followingthe obstruent offset. The use of f0 turned out to be problematic due to missing values, as a number ofsonorants were realised without any glottal pulsing. The use of f1 was found to confuse the classification,presumably because it followed a bimodal distribution conditioned by speaker sex.
24
be said to make correct predictions about the realisation of a token as voiced orvoiceless.
Due to the way the stimuli were constructed, four types of sonorant-transparency-like realisations could potentially be found in the data, as listedin 5. Table 5 also summarises the counts of potential transparency cases for thefour environments.
Table 5: Counts of voiced and voiceless surface realisations (according to k -meansclustering) of obstruents in four environments where sonorant transparency couldoccur. The bold case indicates the number of realisations consistent with the sonoranttransparency hypothesis. Cases where sonorant had been deleted are not included inthe count.
EnvironmentRealisation
Voiced Voiceless1 Underlyingly voiced obstruent+sonorant ##
141 24e.g. /Zubr/ → [Zupr
˚]
2 Underlyingly voiced obstruent+sonorant # voiceless obstruent81 24
e.g. /Zubr#CEdýAw/ → [Zupr˚."CE.dýAw]
3 Underlyingly voiceless obstruent+sonorant # voiced obstruent30 85
e.g. /ts1pr#vjOsnO/ → [ts1br."vjO.snO]4 Underlyingly voiceless obstruent # sonorant + voiced obstruent
9 57e.g. /brAk#mgw1/ → [brAg."mgw1]
The summary of the counts supports the basic generalisations made basedon modelling the recoverability of underlying voicing in pre-sonorant obstruents.Obstruents in word final OS clusters typically retained their underlying voicingspecification on the surface, whether or not an obstruent followed in the sameword. Word-final obstruents were typically realised as voiceless when a cluster ofa sonorant and a voiced obstruent followed in the next word. At the same time,however, pronunciations consistent with the sonorant transparency hypothesiswere not unattested; a small numbers of such pronunciations was recorded in allfour potential environments.
3.3.2 Modelling voicing duration and ratio
The four potential environments for sonorant transparency listed in Table 5involve two situations where an underlyingly voiced obstruent is realised withlimited glottal pulsing, and two situations where an underlyingly voicelessobstruent exhibits surface voicing. The conditioning of these two situationswas analysed in a series of mixed-effects models with random intercepts forspeaker and item. Duration of glottal pulsing and voicing ratio were used asdependent variables. Analysing both, glottal pulsing duration and voicing ratio,
25
Table 6: Summary of the fixed part of a linear mixed-effects model predicting thevoicing ratio in underlyingly voiced obstruents from Conditions 1 and 2. The interceptcorresponds to a pre-sonorant fricative in a monosyllabic word in the absence of a pausefollowing the sonorant.
Term Level β SE t p(Intercept) 0.49 0.07 6.87 <0.001Duration of sonorant voicing 0.001 0.0003 3.45 <0.001Word size disyllabic -0.03 0.03 -0.82 0.43Word size trisyllabic -0.13 0.06 -2.14 0.05Manner (obstruent) stop 0.26 0.05 5.69 <0.001Following pause present 0.12 0.04 3.38 0.001
was motivated by previous literature reports that these two response variablescan be shaped differently by some effects, such as speech rate (Sole, 2007). p-values were calculated based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo confidence intervals,using the pvals function within the languageR package (Baayen, 2011).
The first set of models was fitted to the data in environments 1 and 2 (cf. Table5), where the potential transparency target was underlying voiced. The purposeof the models was to analyse under which conditions devoicing might occur. Amodel with voicing ratio as a dependent variable achieved the best fit with fourfixed effects: duration of sonorant voicing, the number of syllables, whether theobstruent was a stop or a fricative, and whether or not a pause followed. Furthereffects that were analysed, but did not significantly improve the fit of the modelwere sex of the speaker, sonorant’s manner of articulation, obstruent’s place ofarticulation, condition, presence or absence of a boundary tone, duration of thevocalic nucleus in the final syllable, and syntactic characteristics of the structurein which the OS cluster was embedded. The final model is summarised in Table6.
The ratio of voicing to obstruent duration increased significantly with theduration of sonorant voicing (B=0.001 (SE=0.0003), t=3.45, p<0.001). Thevoicing ratio was also greater in monosyllabic than in trisyllabic words (B=-0.13 (SE=0.06), t=-2.14, p=0.05), but there was no significant effect at the levelof disyllabic words (B=-0.03 (SE= 0.03), t=-0.82, p=0.43). The voicing ratiowas significantly higher for stops than for fricatives (B=0.27 (SE=0.05), t=5.69,p<0.001). The ratio was significantly greater if the sonorant was followed by apause (B=0.12 (SE=0.04), t=3.38, p=0.001).
Some of the fixed predictors in the model of voicing ratio showed similar effectsin a model of glottal pulsing duration. The duration of glottal pulsing duringclosure or frication increased significantly with the duration of glottal pulsingduring the following sonorant (B=0.09 (SE=0.04), t=2.48, p=0.022). Glottalpulsing was also longer when the sonorant was followed by a pause (B=13.36(SE=4.48), t=2.98, p=0.004). In addition, there was a significant effect of thepresence of a boundary tone, which involved an increase in the duration of glottal
26
Table 7: Summary of the fixed part of a linear mixed-effects model predicting theduration of glottal pulsing in underlyingly voiced obstruents from Conditions 1 and 2.The intercept corresponds to a pre-sonorant fricative in a monosyllabic word in theabsence of a pause following the sonorant.
Term Level β SE t p(Intercept) 46.32 7.50 6.18 0.001Duration of sonorant voicing 0.09 0.04 2.48 0.022Following pause present 13.36 4.48 2.98 0.004Boundary tone present 8.85 4.38 2.02 0.040
pulsing (B=8.85 (SE=4.38), t=2.02, p=0.040). Adding word size and obstruent’smanner of articulation as predictors did not significantly improve the fit of themodel. Other predictors which did not improve the model’s fit included sex ofthe speaker, sonorant’s manner of articulation, obstruent’s place of articulation,condition, duration of the vocalic nucleus in the final syllable, and syntacticcharacteristics of the structure in which the OS cluster was embedded. The finalmodel is summarised in Table 7, and the effects are plotted in Figure 12.
Results from the two models show that an underlyingly voiced obstruentfollowed by a word-final sonorant was likely to surface with limited glottal pulsingand with limited voicing ratio when the following sonorant does not have anextended voiced portion. In addition, surface devoicing is more likely next torelatively weaker prosodic boundaries indicated by the absence of a followingpause, or a boundary tone. Fricatives followed by word-final sonorants surfacedwith limited voicing compared to stops in terms of ratio, but the effect of manneron the duration of glottal pulsing was not significant. Similarly, more devoicingwas found in longer (trisyllabic) words, as far as voicing ratio is concerned, butthere was no significant effect of word size on the duration of glottal pulsing.
Two mixed-effects models were also fitted to the data in environments 3 and4 (cf. Table 5), where an underlyingly voiceless obstruent was followed by asonorant and a voiced obstruent. The purpose of the analysis was to determinewhen there was increased surface voicing associated with the first obstruent inthe cluster. The model which used voicing ratio as a response variable achievedthe best fit with only one fixed effect, that of obstruent duration. The model’ssummary is in Table 8. Increased voicing ratio was found in obstruents of shorterduration (B=-0.004 (SE=0.0006), t=-5.61, p=0.001). A graphical representationof this effect is in Figure 13. According to the log-likelihood test, the modeldid not improve upon adding further fixed effects, including speaker’s sex, theword size, the manner of articulation of the leftmost obstruent, the mannerof articulation of the sonorant, duration of sonorant voicing, the presence of aboundary tone, duration of the vocalic nucleus, or syntax of the structure . Whatis also noteworthy, is that the fit of the model did not improve when adding theeffect of condition (log-likelihood test: χ2=1.04, p=0.31).
Obstruent duration was not found to have a significant effect of duration of
27
Table 8: Summary of the fixed part of a linear mixed-effects model predicting thevoicing ratio in underlyingly voiceless obstruents from Conditions 2 and 3
Term Level β SE t p(Intercept) 0.75 0.08 9.92 0.001Obstruent duration -0.004 0.0006 -5.61 0.001
glottal pulsing in underlyingly voiceless obstruents from Conditions 2 or 3. Noneof the other predictors considered in the modelling had a significant effect on theduration of glottal pulsing either.
4 Discussion
4.1 The main trends
The view of sonorant transparency that emerges from the current data does notsupport the reports found in the phonological literature. For the majority of datathe sonorant transparency hypothesis makes incorrect predictions with respect tothe surface realisation of the underlying voicing values. If word-final sonorantswere transparent to final devoicing, the surface neutralisation of the underlyingvoicing contrast would be expected in the preceding obstruents. However,underlyingly voiced obstruents followed by a sonorant and a phrase boundarywere found to be realised with significantly more glottal pulsing and f0 lowering,compared to to the surface realisation of underlyingly voiceless obstruents in thesame segmental and prosodic right-hand context. The current data also do notsupport the generalisation that there is regressive voice assimilation between twoobstruents separated by a sonorant and a word boundary. This generalisationwould predict more surface voicing (reflected in e.g. increased glottal pulsing) inthe realisation of O1+S#O2 clusters where O1 is underlyingly voiceless and O2 isunderlyingly voiced, than when O1 is underlyingly voiced and O2 is underlyinglyvoiceless. However, data from the present experiment point to the contrary,which indicates that the leftmost obstruent in the cluster tends to retain itsunderlying voice specifications in its output. Finally, the current data confirmprevious literature reports that the underlying voicing contrast is neutralised onthe surface in word-final obstruents when a sonorant+obstruent cluster follows inthe next word, as the underlying voicing values of these obstruents could not bereliably predicted from the phonetic signal.
The conclusion that follows from these findings is that the sonorant transparencycannot be upheld as a core property in the phonology of Polish. The majorityof the data support the opposite generalisation, i.e. that word-final sonorantsare typically not transparent to final devoicing or voice assimilation. However,there are exceptions to this generalisation, as indicated by the phonetic variationillustrated in Figures 7 and 8, and by the results of k -means clustering. Wetherefore need to ask whether these exceptions are best modelled by an optional
28
rule that somehow renders word-final sonorants phonologically transparent, evenif only in a minority of cases, or whether the concept of phonological transparencyis not useful in understanding the factors that control the distribution of theseexceptions.
4.2 The status of transparency
What would count as evidence for positing an optional rule (with a low frequencyof application) rendering word-final sonorants phonologically transparent inPolish? Such a hypothesis would presumably be strengthened if one could findevidence that, in putative instances of transparency, the presence or absenceof voicing on the surface is categorical, and so best analysed by means of anoperation over features in the phonological component of the grammar. In turn,one might argue for categorical voicing or devoicing if glottal pulsing or voiceratio exhibited a bimodal distribution. However, the bimodality test is easilyconfounded by experimental design, as pointed out by (Scobbie, 2005, 13), whonotes that it is “very easy to find bimodal or multimodal distributions of valuesfor phonetic parameters, where each mode is associated with some conditioningfactor”. The present study is vulnerable to this problem, as the design involveda variety of factors influencing the phonetic realisation of voicing. For instance,if one pools together the duration of glottal pulsing from underlyingly voicedpre-sonorant fricatives and stops, bimodality emerges as a result of inherentduration differences between the two classes of sounds. The problem increaseswith the inclusion of other factors which have been shown to influence theduration of glottal pulsing, including place of articulation, sonorant’s manner ofarticulation and word size. At the same time, analysing the distribution for eachfactor separately is not feasible, as the data are too scarce to provide conclusiveresults. This problem could only be solved with a very large scale study withmultiple tokens per each strictly controlled condition, and, given that lexicallimitations make such control difficult to sustain for multiple test items, a verylarge speaker population would be required. However, even if categorical effectswere found in a larger purpose-designed experiment, ostensibly supporting thepostulation of a phonological operation over features, it would not necessarilyfollow that this operation should be understood as one rendering word-finalsonorants transparent. On the contrary, the phonetic findings reported in thispaper show that simply labelling sonorants as transparent in the relevant tokensprovides little insight into the factors at work.
The results of mixed-effects modelling reveal a considerable array of significanteffects on the duration of glottal pulsing and voicing ratio. All of those individualeffects are in some way predicted and consistent with findings on the influenceson voicing in other languages. Limited phonetic voicing in underlyingly voicelessobstruents followed by word-final sonorants was found when the sonorant alsounderwent complete, or partial devoicing, when the obstruent was a fricative,when then size of the word increased, and preceding relatively weaker prosodicboundaries signalled by the absence of a following pause or a boundary tone. Theeffect of sonorant devoicing can be attributed to glottal coarticulation extending
29
over the entire word-final cluster, in anticipation of a voiceless obstruent, or apause. The observed pre-sonorant fricative devoicing confirms previous literaturefindings of aerodynamic difficulties associated with fricative voicing (Ohala, 1983;Ohala & Sole, 2010), although the aerodynamic difficulty can also be seen asinherent to all obstruents, but more readily observable in fricatives, due to theirincreased duration in comparison to stops. The latter generalisation appearsconsistent with the finding that obstruent manner had a significant effect onthe voicing ratio, but not on the absolute duration of glottal pulsing. Theeffect of word size is reminiscent of Wedel’s (2002) observation for Turkishwhere monosyllabic words resist voicing alternations, and suggests that morecomplex factors of lexical access may also enter into conditioning of phonetic andphonological voicing5. The effect of increased devoicing when a voiceless obstruentfollowed compared to a following phrase boundary is the only effect that suggests acoarticulatory influence. However, there was no parallel coarticulatory effect thatwould involve relatively more voicing of underlyingly voiceless obstruents fromConditions 2 (O1S#O2) and 3 (O1#SO2) across weaker prosodic boundaries.Surface voicing of underlyingly voiceless obstruents in Conditions 2 and 3 wassensitive to only one influence, that of obstruent duration. Importantly, relativelyshorter obstruents showed significantly increased voicing ratio, but not increasein vocal fold vibration. This would suggest that the increase in ratio is littlemore than a byproduct of obstruent shortening, which itself may be conditionedby other factors, such as prosodic boundary effects. The presence of a relativelyweaker prosodic boundary, as found for the majority of test item realisations inConditions 2 and 3, may involve decreased duration, as relatively weaker prosodicboundaries have been found to have a limiting effect on final lenghtening (Kuzlaet al., 2007). The production of voiceless obstruent flanked by a vowel anda sonorant consonant is likely to show some laryngeal overlap, as it involvestransitions between presence and absence of vocal fold vibration. The sameamount of glottal pulsing ‘spilling over’ to a voiceless stop from a neighbouringsonorant will translate into relatively higher voicing ratio if the obstruent itselfis relatively shorter.
The term ‘transparency’ suggests that the sonorant is somehow not involvedin the laryngeal assimilation. However, the effect of sonorant voicing on thephonetic devoicing of a preceding obstruent suggests the contrary, i.e. thatsonorants do participate in laryngeal coarticulation. At the same time, thetendency for the whole cluster to devoice is not absolute, as there were cases inthe dataset of phonetically devoiced obstruents followed by phonetically voicedsonorants. This observation challenges the argument that sonorant devoicingis a phonetic manifestation of their phonological transparency, as proposed byGussmann (1992) (cf. discussion in Section 1). Instead, it appears that cases
5A reviewer suggests an alternative explanations for the word size effects observed in this studywhich has to do with differences in phonetic duration conditioned by the length of the word. Forinstance, segments tend to be phonetically longer in shorter words. Vowel lengthening could potentiallyfacilitate voiced percepts of the following obstruent, counteracting perception-driven devoicing. Onthe other hand, lengthening of the obstruent itself is in some ways likely to trigger devoicing, as vocalfold vibration is aerodynamically counteracted through prolonged stricture.
30
of pre-sonorant devoicing really involve two types of situations conditioned byconspiring, but separate processes. The first process is laryngeal coarticulationwhich affects the entire cluster. The other process involves surface obstruentdevoicing (for instance due to a rise in supraglottal air pressure during stricture)even though the vocal fold vibration then resumes during the following sonorant.
There is no direct link between any of the attested effects and the visibility ofsonorants to laryngeal processes. For instance, while the high intraoral pressureassociated with frication might impede the production of glottal pulsing, it doesnot in any obvious way determine why the following sonorant should allowassimilation. Similarly, there is nothing inherent about sonorant transparencythat would predict any of the previously discussed significant effects on therealisation of glottal pulsing. Thus, a formal model positing that word-finalsonorants following fricatives are optionally transparent departs from a wellmotivated phonetic relationship towards an arbitrary interaction without gainingany additional explanatory or predictive power.
All in all, it appears that the realisation of glottal pulsing in Polishobstruent+sonorant clusters results from a complex interaction of the followingfactors: underlying voicing value on the obstruent, phonological rule of word-final obstruent devoicing, gestural coordination of the state of the glottis intime, aerodynamic pressures on the maintenance of voicing during obstruentarticulation, and perhaps even lexical influence evidenced by increased contrastin shorter words. All of these involves interactions of phonology, phonetics andthe lexicon on the realisation of glottal pulsing in an obstruent, and are mostaccurately analysed as just that. By simply pooling together all the apparentcases of putative laryngeal neutralisation in word-final obstruent+sonorantclusters, and applying the label ‘transparency’ to them, one gains no insightinto the phenomena: no predictions follow. Instead the relevant factors arecounterintuitively obscured.
To sum up, even for the subset of the data that appear consistent withthe sonorant transparency hypothesis, the theory does not predict the kindof variation we find. While positing a sonorant transparency rule allows togeneralise over a number of different cases, including voicing and devoicingassimilation, as well as final devoicing, it is a case of ill-conceived parsimony, asthe generalisation obscures relevant aspects of when the purported transparencyoccurs. In comparison, a hybrid model of multi-level phonological, articulatory,aerodynamic and lexical influences on phonetic variation associated with laryngealprocesses is better suited to deal with the wide array of laryngeal effects associatedwith pre-sonorant obstruents, and it does so without positing an additionalphonological phenomenon of transparency, for which there is no direct evidence.
4.3 Some phonological consequences
The finding that pre-sonorant obstruents tend to retain their underlying voicespecification has far reaching theoretical consequences, as it undermines severalanalyses of voicing in Polish. First, it undermines syllable-based analyses of finaldevoicing in Polish, as proposed by Bethin (1984) and Gussmann (1992). The
31
analyses by the two authors exclude voiced obstruents from surfacing in codas.This prediction is falsified by the consistent production of voiced obstruents in thepre-sonorant position by speakers in Experiment 1 and 2. One might ask whetherword-final sonorants in obstruent+sonorant are not syllabic, in which cases thepreceding obstruent is syllabified into an onset. Certainly positing an extrasyllable in words with final OS clusters goes against the native intuitions aboutthe number of syllables in such words. Such intuitions are further corroboratedby the behaviour of word stress. Polish has a productive pattern of penultimatestress, as exemplified by the alternations in (9).
(9) Penultimate stress in Polish["rO.vEr] ‘bicycle’[rO."vE.r1] ‘bicycle, Nom. ’[rO.vE."rA.mi] ‘bicycle, Inst. ’
Since stress shifts to the penultimate syllable in morphophonological alternations,it creates a test for syllabicity. Word-final sonority-violating sonorants do notcause a stress shift, and thus they cannot be analysed as syllabic.
(10) Penultimate stress in Polish["u.lEgw ] ‘he gave in’ *[u."lE.gw ][mE."xA.ñizm] ‘mechanism’ *[mE.xA."ñi.zm]
If word-final sonorants cannot form a syllable nucleus, the preceding obstruentsmust be codas, not onsets. And since those obstruents can be realised as voiced,syllable-conditioned rules make wrong empirical predictions for Polish voicing.
At this point a question might perhaps arise in the reader’s mind concerninghow the discrepancy could arise between the data on transparency found in thedescriptive and phonological literature and the data produced by the participantsin the two experiments presented in this paper. The earliest reference onsonorant transparency that I have been able to trace is Benni (1959). Benni’sgeneralisation has then been confirmed by a number of authors, but all the reportsappear to have been based on introspective data and/or auditory transcriptions.Neither of these methods is well suited to deal with variable data, and voicing inword-final stop+sonorant clusters does involve a considerable degree of inter-and intra-speaker variation. Failure to perceive this kind of variation mightresult in generalisations which involve possible pronunciations, but which areonly representative of a subset of the data. Apart from variation, divergingreports concerning sonorant transparency might potentially be due to dialectaldifferences. However, as the participants in the study were speakers of standardPolish with no discernible regional features, their results certainly go againstgrammatical descriptions which focus on the standard variety.
Another issue that transpires in relation to the current findings is the generalvalidity of the theoretical notion of sonorant transparency. I have argued thatsonorant transparency is not empirically supported for Polish. However, asPolish had previously been cited as the key case in support of the hypothesisthat sonorant may be transparent to voicing, the present results undermine
32
the status of transparency in a broader cross-linguistic perspective. The otherpotential transparency case is Russian, however early reports of Russian sonoranttransparency to voice assimilation have been disputed once experimental data hadbeen obtained (Robblee & Burton, 1997; Padgett, 2002, 2012; Kulikov, 2010). Inthe light of combined experimental results from the current study and the citedstudies on Russian the question arises whether voicing processes ever operateacross an intervening sonorant. A positive answer to this question seems to beyet awaiting a convincingly documented case.
5 Conclusion
The argument put forward in this paper is that sonorant transparency is not a partof the Polish grammar. The majority trend in the phonetic realisation of voicingin word-final obstruent+sonorant clusters is to preserve the underlying voicingvalue of the obstruent. Although some exceptions to this tendency can be found,they can be understood as reflecting phonetic influences which oppose vocal foldvibration in some cases, and coarticulatory mechanisms which may yield surfacevoicing and devoicing patterns. These two phenomena may also be modulatedby factors such as prosodic boundary effects. Treating the exceptional voicingand devoicing cases as forming a coherent phenomenon of sonorant transparencyis empirically inadequate, as the generalisation struggles to make any predictionswith respect to how much voicing is produced by Polish speakers and under whatcircumstances. Re-analysing transparency in terms of multiple influences on vocalfold vibration is also of consequence to formal approaches to Polish coda voicing,as it challenges the analyses which treat Polish final devoicing as a syllable-levelphenomenon.
References
Baayen, R. H. (2011). languageR: Data sets and functions with “AnalyzingLinguistic Data: A practical introduction to statistics”. R package version1.2.
Baer, T. (1975). Investigation of phonation using excised larynxes. Ph.D. thesisMIT.
Barry, S. (1988). Temporal aspects of the devoicing of word-final obstruents inRussian. In J. N. Holmes, & W. A. Ainsworth (Eds.), Speech’88. (Proceedingsof the Federation of Acoustical Societies of Europe, August 1988) (pp. 81–88).Edinburgh: Institute of Acoustics.
Bates, D., & Maechler, M. (2009). lme4: Linear mixed-effects models using S4classes. R package version 0.999375-32.
33
Becker, M., & Nevins, A. (2009). Initial-syllable faithfulness as the best modelof word-size effects in alternations. Handout from presentation at NELS 40,MIT.
Benni, T. (1959). Fonetyka opisowa jezyka polskiego. Wroc law: Zak lad Narodowyim. Ossolinskich.
Bethin, C. Y. (1984). Voicing assimilation in Polish. International Journal ofSlavic Linguistics and Poetics, 29 , 17–32.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2010). Praat: doing phonetics by computer[Computer programme].Version 5.1.12, retrieved 15 October 2009 fromhttp://www.praat.org/.
Castellvı-Vives, J. (2003). Neutralisation and transparency effects in consonantclusters in Polish. In Proceedings of the 15th ICPhS Barcelona.
Charles-Luce, J. (1985). Word-final devoicing in German: Effects of phonetic andsentential contexts. Journal of Phonetics, 13 , 309–324.
Chen, M. (1970). Vowel length variation as a function of the voicing of theconsonant environment. Phonetica, 22 , 129–159.
Cho, T. (2004). Prosodically conditioned strengthening and vowel-to-vowelcoarticulation in English. Journal of Phonetics, 32 , 141–176.
Crystal, T. H., & House, A. S. (1988). A note on the durations of fricatives inAmerican English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 84 , 1932–1935.
Demenko, G. (2000). Automatic analysis of phrase in Polish. Speech and LanguageTechnology , 4 , 13–22.
Dukiewicz, L., & Sawicka, I. (1995). Fonetyka i fonologia. Krakow: WydawnictwoInstytutu Jezyka Polskiego PAN.
Fischer-Jørgensen, E. (1954). Acoustic analysis of stop consonants. MiscellaneaPhonetica, 2 , 42–59.
Forrez, G. (1966). Relevante parameters van de stemhebbende fricatief /z/. Inst.Perceptie Onderzoek Verslag (Eindhoven).
Fourakis, M., & Iverson, G. (1984). On the ‘incomplete neutralization’ of Germanfinal obstruents. Phonetica, 41 , 140–149.
Francuzik, K., Karpinski, M., & Klesta, J. (2002). A preliminary study of theintonational phrase, nuclear melody and pauses in Polish semi-spontaneousnarration. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002 .
34
Gussmann, E. (1992). Resyllabification and delinking: the case of Polish voicing.Linguistic Inquiry , 23 , 29–56.
Hartigan, J. A., & Wong, M. A. (1979). A k-means clustering algorithm. AppliedStatistics, 28 , 100—108.
House, A. S., & Fairbanks, G. (1953). The influence of consonant environmentupon the secondary acoustical characteristics of vowels. Journal of theAcoustical Society of America, 25 , 105–113.
Jakobson, R. (1978). Mutual assimilation of Russian voiced and voicelessconsonants. Studia Linguistica, 32 , 107–110.
Jassem, W., & Richter, L. (1989). Neutralisation of voicing in Polish obstruents.Journal of Phonetics, 17 , 317–325.
Karas, M., & Madejowa, M. (1977). S lownik wymowy polskiej (The Dictionaryof Polish pronunciation). Warszawa: PWN.
Keating, P. A. (1980). A Phonetic Study of a Voicing Contrast in Polish. Ph.D.thesis Brown University.
Keating, P. A. (1984). Physiological effects on stop consonant voicing. UCLAWorking Papers in Phonetics, 59 , 29–34.
Kingston, J., & Diehl, R. L. (1994). Phonetic knowledge. Language, 70 , 419–454.
Kluender, K. R., Diehl, R. L., & Wright, B. A. (1988). Vowel-length differencesbefore voiced and voiceless consonants: An auditory explanation. Journal ofPhonetics, 16 , 153–169.
Kulikov, V. (2010). Phonetics and phonology of voice assimilation and sonoranttransparency in normal and fast speech in Russian. Ms, University of Iowa.
Kuzla, C., Cho, T., & Ernestus, M. (2007). Prosodic strengthening of Germanfricatives in duration and assimilatory devoicing. Journal of Phonetics, 35 ,301–320.
Ladefoged, P., & Maddieson, I. (1996). The Sounds of the World’s Languages.Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Ohala, J. J. (1983). The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints. InP. MacNeilage (Ed.), The Production of Speech. New York: Springer.
Ohala, J. J., & Sole, M.-J. (2010). Turbulence and phonology. In S. Fuchs,M. Toda, & M. Zygis (Eds.), Turbulent sounds. An interdisciplinary guide (pp.37–97). Berlin: Mouton deGruyter.
Ostaszewska, D., & Tambor, J. (2000). Fonetyka i fonologia wspo lczesnego jezykapolskiego. Warszawa: PWN.
35
Padgett, J. (2002). Russian voicing assimilation, final devoicing, and the problemof [v] (or, the mouse that squeaked). Ms., University of California, Santa Cruz.
Padgett, J. (2012). The role of prosody in Russian voicing. In T. Borowsky,S. Kawahara, T. Shinya, & M. Sugahara (Eds.), Prosody Matters: Essays inHonor of Elisabeth Selkirk . Equinox.
Peterson, G. E., & Lehiste, I. (1960). Duration of syllable nuclei in English.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 32 , 693–703.
Petrova, O., & Szentgyorgyi, S. (2004). /v/and voice assimilation in Hungarianand Russian. Folia linguistica, 38 , 87–116.
Pierrehumbert, J. B. (1980). The phonology and phonetics of English intonation.Ph.D. thesis MIT.
Port, R. F., & O’Dell, M. L. (1985). Neutralization of syllable-final voicing inGerman. Journal of Phonetics, (pp. 455–471).
Prince, A., & Smolensky, P. (2004 [1993]). Constraint interaction in generativegrammar . Malden, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
R Development Core Team (2005). R: A language and environment for statisticalcomputing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. ISBN3-900051-07-0.
Robblee, K. E., & Burton, M. W. (1997). Sonorant voicing transparency inRussian. In W. Browne, & D. Zec (Eds.), Proceedings of Formal Approachesto Slavic Linguistics (pp. 407–434). Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications.
Rubach, J. (1996). Nonsyllabic analysis of voice assimilation in Polish. LinguisticInquiry , 27 , 69–110.
Rubach, J. (2008). Prevocalic faithfulness. Phonology , 25 , 433–468.
Rubach, J., & Booij, G. (1990). Edge of constituent effects in Polish. NaturalLanguage and Linguistic Theory , 8 , 427–463.
Scheer, T. (2004). Lateral Theory of Phonology: What is CVCV, and why shouldit be? . Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Scobbie, J. M. (2005). The phonetics-phonology overlap. QMUC Speech ScienceResearch Centre Working Papers, 1 .
Shapiro, M. (1993). Russian non-distinctive voicing: a stocktaking. RussianLinguistics, 17 , 1–14.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Turk, A. E. (1996). A prosody tutorial for investigatorsof auditory sentence processing. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 25 , 193–247.
36
Slis, I. H., & Cohen, A. (1969). On the complex regulating the voiced-voicelessdistinction I. Language and Speech, 12 , 80–102.
Slowiaczek, L., & Dinnsen, D. A. (1985). On the neutralizing status of Polishword-final devoicing. Journal of Phonetics, 13 , 325–341.
Sole, M.-J. (2007). Controlled and mechanical properties in speech: a review ofthe literature. In M.-J. Sole, P. S. Beddor, & M. Ohala (Eds.), Experimentalapproaches to phonology (pp. 302–321). New York: Oxford University Press.
Steriade, D. (1999). Phonetics in phonology: the case of laryngeal neutralization. In M. Gordon (Ed.), Papers in Phonology 3 (UCLA Working Papers inLinguistics 2) (pp. 25–145). Los Angeles: Department of Linguistics, Universityof California.
Stevens, K. (1998). Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stevens, K. N., Blumstein, S. E., Glicksman, L., Burton, M., & Kurowski, K.(1992). Acoustic and perceptual characteristics of voicing in fricatives andfricative clusters. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 91 , 2979–3000.
Tucker, B. V., & Warner, N. (2010). What it means to be phonetic orphonological: the case of Romanian devoiced nasals. Phonology , 27 , 289–324.
Wedel, A. (2002). Phonological alternation, lexical neighborhood density andmarkedness in processing. Handout from presentation at LabPhon8, YaleUniversity.
Westbury, J. R., & Keating, P. A. (1986). On the naturalness of stop consonantvoicing. Journal of Linguistics, 22 , 145–166.
Wierzchowska, B. (1980). Fonetyka i fonologia jezyka polskiego. Wroc law: Zak ladNarodowy im. Ossolinskich.
Appendix
Test items used in experiment 1
/tr/ wiatr ‘wind’/pr/ Cypr ‘Cyprus’/pr/ Dniepr ‘The Dnieper River’/tw/ zmiot l ‘wiped out, 3p., sg.’/kw/ uciek l ‘escaped, 3p., sg.’/dr/ kadr ‘personell, gen. pl.’/br/ zubr ‘bison’/br/ kobr ‘cobra snakes, Gen.’/dw/ schud l ‘lost weight, 3p., sg.’/gw/ uleg l ‘gave in, 3p., sg.’
37
Control items used in experiment 1
/d#m/ posrod miasta ‘amidst the city’/d#n/ porod naturalny ‘natural delivery’/d#j/ przeszkod jezdzieckich ‘show jumping obstacles, Gen.’/d#r/ rozwod rodzicow ‘parents’ divorce’/d#l/ powod lekow ‘reason for anxieties’/d#w/ zawod lowcy ‘hunter’s profession’/d#o/ swobod obywatelskich ‘civic rights gen.’
/t#m/ przewrot majowy ‘The May Coup d’Etat’/t#n/ przerzut narkotykow ‘illegal drug transfer’/t#j/ zarzut jest ‘an objection is’/t#r/ walut Rosji ‘currencies of Russia gen. pl.’/t#l/ nawrot leku ‘return of anxiety, Gen.’
/t#w/debiut lodzkiego ‘debut of a Lodz-based(dokumentalisty) documentary-maker’
/t#o/ statut okresla ‘charter determines’
Test items used in experiment 2. Condition 1
/br/ zubr ‘bison’/br/ kobr ‘cobra snakes, Gen.’/dr/ kadr ‘personell, Gen.’/dm/ wydm ‘dunes, Gen.’/zm/ pryzm ‘heap, Gen.’/dw/ schud l ‘lost weight, 3p. Masc.’/dr/ katedr ‘cathedrals, Gen.’/gw/ uleg l ‘succumbed, 3p. Masc.’/dw/ napad l ‘attacked’, 3p. Masc./gw/ pomog l ‘helped, 3p. Masc.’/zm/ mechanizm ‘mechanism’/pr/ Cypr ‘Cyprus’/pr/ Dniepr ‘The Dnieper River’/tr/ wiatr ‘wind’/tm/ rytm ‘rhythm’/sm/ pasm ‘streaks, Gen.’/tw/ zmiot l ‘wiped (out), 3p. Masc.’/tr/ teatr ‘theatre’/kw/ uciek l ‘esaped 3p. Masc.’/tw/ przygniot l ‘crushed, 3p. Masc.’/kw/ przywlok l ‘dragged in, 3p. Masc.’/sm/ czasopism ‘magazines, Gen.’
38
Test items used in experiment 2. Condition 2.
/br#C/ zubr siedzia l ‘the bison was sitting’/br#k/ kobr krolewskich ‘king cobras, Gen.’/dr#f/ kadr filmowy ‘film frame’/dm#p/ wydm piaskowych ‘sand dunes, Gen.’/zm#C/ pryzm sniegu ‘heaps of snow, Gen.’/dw#k/ schud l kilogram ‘lost a kilo, 3p. Masc’/dr#C/ katedr swiata ‘cathedrals of the world, Gen.’/gw#p/ uleg l presji ‘succumbed to the pressure, 3p. Masc.’/dw#k/ napad l kobiete ‘attacked a woman’, 3p. Masc./gw#C/ pomog l siostrze ‘helped a sister, 3p. Masc.’/zm#f/ mechanizm finansowy ‘financial mechanism’/pr#v/ Cypr wiosna ‘Cyprus in the spring’/pr#v/ Dniepr wyla l ‘The Dnieper overflowed its banks’/tr#v/ wiatr wia l ‘wind was blowing’/tm#v/ rytm walca ‘waltz rhythm’/sm#v/ pasm wieczornych ‘evening programmes, Gen.’/tw#d/ zmiot l dach ‘blew the roof off, 3p. Masc.’/tr#v/ Teatr Wybrzeze ‘The Coast Theatre’/kw#v/ uciek l w ladzom ‘escaped from the authorities 3p. Masc.’/tw#g/ przygniot l gornika ‘crushed a miner, 3p. Masc.’/kw#b/ przywlok l balterie ‘dragged in bacteria, 3p. Masc.’/sm#z/ czasopism zagranicznych ‘foreign magazines, Gen.’
Test items used in experiment 2. Condition 3
/Z#mC/ zo lnierz msciwy ‘vengeful soldier’
/z#wk/obraz lkajacego ‘the sightdziecka of a weeping child’
/v#rt/ termometrow rteciowych ‘mercury thermometers, Gen. ’/g#mS/ plag mszyc ‘plagues of aphids, Gen.’/k#mg/ brak mg ly ‘lack of fog’/k#wg/ stek lgarstw ‘a bunch of lies’/C# lZ/ komus lzej ‘easier for somebody’/t#rd/ kwiat rdestu ‘water pepper flower’
39
0 50 100 200
0.50
0.60
0.70
Duration of sonorant voicing (ms)
Voi
cing
rat
io
●
●
●0.50
0.54
0.58
0.62
Word size
Voi
cing
rat
io
disyllabic monosyllabic trisyllabic
●
●
0.60
0.70
0.80
Manner (obstruent)
Voi
cing
rat
io
fricative stop
●
●
0.60
0.64
0.68
0.72
Following pause
Voi
cing
rat
io
absent present
Figure 11: Effects plot for the linear mixed-effects model model predicting the voicingratio in underlyingly voiced obstruents from Conditions 1 and 2.
40
0 50 100 150 200 250
5055
6065
70
Duration of sonorant voicing (ms)
Glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng d
urat
ion
(ms)
●
●
5862
6670
Following pause
Glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng d
urat
ion
(ms)
absent present
●
●
5860
6264
66
Boundary tone
Glo
ttal p
ulsi
ng d
urat
ion
(ms)
absent present
Figure 12: Effects plot for the linear mixed-effects model model predicting the durationof glottal pulsing in underlyingly voiced obstruents from Conditions 1 and 2.
41
50 100 150 200
0.0
0.2
0.4
0.6
Obstruent duration
Voi
cing
rat
io
Figure 13: Effects plot for the linear mixed-effects model model predicting the voicingratio in underlyingly voiceless obstruents from Conditions 2 and 3.
42
![Sonorant voicing ([SV]) in Comox-Sliammon1](https://img.pdfslide.us/doc/110x75/61e8f735a4bb4834ff3f8a65/sonorant-voicing-sv-in-comox-sliammon1.jpg)
