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Vocal fold vibrations are more difficult to achieve in obstruents than sonorants due to the aerodynamic voicing constraint (AVC), i.e., the fact that a buildup of air pressure in the supraglottal cavity during oral closures reduces the transglottal airflow. The AVC can be circumvented by various voicing adjustment gestures, such as larynx lowering, tongue root advancement and tongue body lowering. The current study employed laryngeal and lingual ultrasound to investigate the use of these strategies in Canadian French. The vertical movement of the larynx was measured using optical flow analysis, while lingual movement was analyzed by tracking X and Y coordinates at distinct fanlines across consecutive images. Results revealed that there was more pronounced larynx lowering in voiced obstruents and that it tended to be greater in voiced stops than in voiced fricatives. Tongue-related maneuvers displayed more interspeaker variation but tendencies showed that the tongue root was more advanced in voiced stops than in voiced fricatives and slightly more for /d/ than /b/. Significant tongue body lowering was observed for both voiced stops and voiced fricatives only preceding the vowel /a/. Finally, larynx lowering was strongly correlated with voicing duration in voiced obstruents. A similar but weaker correlation was found for tongue root advancement. Overall, this study suggests that larynx lowering is an efficient strategy to circumvent the AVC in Canadian French but that some speakers may also resort to lingual adjustments. Additional strategies that are known to play a role, such as nasal or oral leakage, were not considered.

This paper explores an instance of prosodic augmentation (Lovick 2023: 382) via devoicing in Mẽbêngôkre, a Jê language spoken in Brazilian Amazonia. While segment lengthening is usually associated with prosodic augmentation, in Mẽbêngôkre high vowels can be devoiced, besides also lengthened, to express intensity. While all vowel segments in Mẽbêngôkre can be lengthened for expressive means, only high vowels /i ɨ u/ can be both lengthened and devoiced. This talk contributes to studies on expressiveness and iconicity in language by showing that vowel devoicing can also be targeted by prosodic augmentation.

The present paper investigates the link between perception and production in the laryngeal phonology of multilingual speakers, focusing on non-contrastive segments and the dynamic aspect of these processes. Fourteen L1 Hungarian, L2 English, and L3 Spanish advanced learners took part in the experiments. The production experiments examined the aspiration of voiceless stops in word-initial position, regressive voicing assimilation, and pre-sonorant voicing; the latter two processes were analyzed both word-internally and across word boundaries. The perception experiments aimed to find out whether learners notice the phonetic outputs of these processes and regard them as linguistically relevant. Our results showed that perception and production are not aligned. Accurate production is dependent on accurate perception, but accurate perception is not necessarily transferred into production. In laryngeal postlexical processes, the native language seems to play the primary role even for highly competent learners, but markedness might be relevant too. The novel findings of this study are that phonetic category formation seems to be easier than the acquisition of dynamic allophonic alternations and that metaphonological awareness is correlated with perception but not with production.

Many Aboriginal Australian communities are undergoing language shift from traditional Indigenous languages to contact varieties such as Kriol, an English-lexified Creole. Kriol is reportedly characterised by lexical items with highly variable phonological specifications, and variable implementation of voicing and manner contrasts in obstruents (Sandefur, 1986). A language, such as Kriol, characterised by this unusual degree of variability presents Kriol-acquiring children with a potentially difficult language-learning task, and one which challenges the prevalent theories of acquisition. To examine stop consonant acquisition in this unusual language environment, we present a study of Kriol stop and affricate production, followed by a mispronunciation detection study, with Kriol-speaking children (ages 4-7) from a Northern Territory community where Kriol is the lingua franca. In contrast to previous claims, the results suggest that Kriol-speaking children acquire a stable phonology and lexemes with canonical phonemic specifications, and that English experience would not appear to induce this stability.

This paper investigates voicing assimilation across morpheme and word boundaries in Najdi Arabic (NA) from both phonetic and phonological perspectives. Although voicing assimilation has been widely documented cross-linguistically, its realization in NA remains underexplored. Using autosegmental theory and feature geometry, the study examines how the alveolar stop /t/ in the proclitic /mit-/ behaves when followed by different consonants and whether assimilation in NA is categorical or gradient. Acoustic data were elicited from eight native male speakers, yielding 288 tokens produced in controlled elicitation tasks. Vowel duration, F1, and F2 were obtained in Praat and statistically compared across voiceless (VL) and voiced (VD) contexts. The results reveal systematic regressive assimilation when /t/ precedes a coronal obstruent, producing a fully identical geminate through delinking and reassociation of the C-place node. In VD contexts, vowels preceding assimilated segments were longer, exhibited lower F1 and higher F2 values, and showed continuous voicing, providing clear acoustic evidence of assimilation. Assimilation was consistently blocked before non-coronal and sonorant consonants, confirming feature-geometry predictions. The same mechanism operated across both morpheme and word boundaries, indicating a unified assimilation rule in NA. Overall, the findings show that voicing assimilation in NA is categorically implemented yet phonetically grounded, situating the dialect within the broader Arabic typology.

There is ample evidence that motor learning changes the function of perceptual systems. Previous studies examining the interactions between speech production and perception have shown that the discrimination of phonetic contrasts characterized by the difference in articulatory place features is altered following their production changes caused by the perturbation of auditory feedback. The present study focused on a voiced–voiceless contrast in stop consonants, which is characterized by a temporal articulatory parameter, voice-onset time (VOT). In the experiment, we manipulated the participants’ motor functions concerning VOT using a cross-categorical auditory feedback (CAF) paradigm (Mitsuya et al. in J Acoust Soc Am 135:2986–2994, 2014), in which a pre-recorded syllable sound starting with a voiced stop consonant (/da/) was fed back simultaneously with the participant’s utterance of a voiceless stop consonant (/ta/), and vice versa. The VOT difference between /da/ and /ta/ productions was increased by the CAF, which is consistent with the result of Mitsuya’s study. In addition, we conducted perceptual identification tasks of /da/-/ta/ continuum stimuli varying in VOT before and after the CAF task, and found that the identification function became sharper after as compared to before the CAF task. A significant positive correlation between such production and perception changes was also found. On the basis of these results, we consider that the change in motor function concerning VOT affected voiced–voiceless perceptual processing. The present study is the first to show the involvement of the speech production system in the perception of phonetic contrasts characterized by articulatory temporal features.

Previously, we demonstrated a strong correlation between the amplitude of human speech and the emission rate of micron-scale expiratory aerosol particles, which are believed to play a role in respiratory disease transmission. To further those findings, here we systematically investigate the effect of different 'phones' (the basic sound units of speech) on the emission of particles from the human respiratory tract during speech. We measured the respiratory particle emission rates of 56 healthy human volunteers voicing specific phones, both in isolation and in the context of a standard spoken text. We found that certain phones are associated with significantly higher particle production; for example, the vowel /i/ (\"need,\" \"sea\") produces more particles than /ɑ/ (\"saw,\" \"hot\") or /u/ (\"blue,\" \"mood\"), while disyllabic words including voiced plosive consonants (e.g., /d/, /b/, /g/) yield more particles than words with voiceless fricatives (e.g., /s/, /h/, /f/). These trends for discrete phones and words were corroborated by the time-resolved particle emission rates as volunteers read aloud from a standard text passage that incorporates a broad range of the phones present in spoken English. Our measurements showed that particle emission rates were positively correlated with the vowel content of a phrase; conversely, particle emission decreased during phrases with a high fraction of voiceless fricatives. Our particle emission data is broadly consistent with prior measurements of the egressive airflow rate associated with the vocalization of various phones that differ in voicing and articulation. These results suggest that airborne transmission of respiratory pathogens via speech aerosol particles could be modulated by specific phonetic characteristics of the language spoken by a given human population, along with other, more frequently considered epidemiological variables.

Final obstruent devoicing is common in the world's languages and constitutes a clear case of parallel phonological evolution. Final obstruent voicing, in contrast, is claimed to be rare or nonexistent. Two distinct theoretical approaches crystalize around obstruent voicing patterns. Traditional markedness accounts view these sound patterns as consequences of universal markedness constraints prohibiting voicing, or favoring voicelessness, in final position, and predict that final obstruent voicing does not exist. In contrast, phonetic-historical accounts explain skewed patterns of voicing in terms of common phonetically based devoicing tendencies, allowing for rare cases of final obstruent voicing under special conditions. In this article, phonetic and phonological evidence is offered for final obstruent voicing in Lakota, an indigenous Siouan language of the Great Plains of North America. In Lakota, oral stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ are regularly pronounced as [b], [l], and [ɡ] in word- and syllable-final position when phrase-final devoicing and preobstruent devoicing do not occur.

Speech perception is influenced by language-specific phonological knowledge. While phonotactics has long been established to play a role, the study of how phonological alternations influence perception is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make a case for the latter by investigating the role of regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) in the perception of obstruent clusters in Emilian dialects of Italian. We provide empirical evidence from a phoneme-detection task, in which Emilian listeners reported to have heard [b] significantly more often in stimuli with a /p/ before a voiced obstruent (RVA context) than before a vowel (non-RVA context). Our experimental findings add to recent work on the influence of phonology on speech perception. In addition, we provide an explicit formalisation, which bolsters the need for a rigid distinction between phonetic, surface and underlying representation, and an explicit mapping between all three, both in the process of speech production and comprehension.