Devoicing of phonologically voiced obstruents: Is European Portuguese different from other Romance languages?

Pape and Jesus (2011)

In Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2011), Hong Kong, China, pp. 1566-1569.

This paper presents results for voicing maintenance during European Portuguese (EP) stop and fricative production. Results showed that EP presented a high amount of devoicing for all phonologically voiced stops and fricatives. This is in contrast to classical literature reporting high voicing maintenance during stop closure for Romance languages, but confirms our preliminary results from previous work. Further, for the first time results are presented for the analyses of (time-dependent) voicing profiles for EP. These profiles show differences in manner or place of articulation. However, a strong speaker-dependency on both devoicing percentage and voicing profiles is observed. Analysis of the effect of height of the following vowel on devoicing showed no difference for three of four speakers. However, for one speaker higher devoicing for all consonants when followed by a low vowel was observed.

PapeJesus2011.pdf - Paper (CutePDF (Ghostscript 8.71) file)

PapeJesus2011_ppt.pdf - Poster presentation (Mac OS X Version 10.5.8 generic .pdf file)


Last updated 1/9/2011
lmtj@ua.pt
Luís Miguel Teixeira de Jesus

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