Syllable-wide distribution of acoustic cues to coda voicing

Abstract

In English, the strongest acoustic cues to preserving the voicing contrast in coda stops are in the preceding vowel: a voiced coda is associated with a longer vowel and a voiceless coda with a shorter vowel. Our recent work (Jacewicz et al., 2021) examining structured variability in stop voicing implementation in female productions showed that the cues to stop coda voicing extended to the syllable initial stop. In running speech, the /b/-closure in “bad” was shorter when coda was voiced, and it was longer when coda was voiceless (“bat”). Here, we test the hypothesis that voicing contrast cueing the “bad-bat” distinction is reinforced syllable-wide and involves specific long-distance timing relationships between closures of both stops, the extent of their closure voicing, vowel duration, and positive VOT. The current dataset consists of 2610 productions by 45 adult males, who are also diversified by dialect. Preliminary analyses confirmed that segmental voicing information is distributed over long domains (here, a monosyllabic word) and that cues to coda voicing are available in the syllable onset. These findings imply that temporal relationships among acoustic phonetic detail cueing lexical distinctions can potentially enhance the perceptual dimensions of perceived syllable- or word-wide voicelessness and voicing.