Acoustic, articulatory and perceptual analyses of the post-vocalic voicing contrast in German.

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In models of phonology based on the generative tradition, speech is represented as a set ofcategories and rewrite rules that transform these categories to speech output via a universalphonetic component. However, recent evidence from a number of studies in the area oflaboratory phonology suggests that phonological knowledge is not categorical but needs toincorporate probabilistic information; that fine phonetic detail is stored in the lexicon; thatphonological knowledge may well vary from speaker to speaker even of the same dialect; andthat the cues that distinguish between categories can be broadly distributed across prosodicdomains. In this proposal, we explore a number of these issues through a phonology-phoneticrelationship that has received considerable attention in the literature, namely the post-vocalicvoicing contrast in German. Five types of analyses will be undertaken. Firstly, whetherneutralization of the voicing contrast is complete. Secondly, whether there are differencesbetween the production and perception of contrasts in a neutralizing context. Thirdly, whetherprobabilistic information based on combinations of vowels tensity and voicing features inGerman influence perceptual judgements of voicing contrasts. Fourthly, whether speakerdifferences, dialect and linguistic background influence the perception of the voicing contrast.Finally, we use corpus-based, articulatory, and acoustic techniques to investigate the extent towhich the post-vocalic voicing contrast in German can be modelled by phonological featuressuch as [voice] or [tense]. In more general terms, the proposal seeks to make a contribution toour understanding of the relationship between speech production, speech perception, andphonological structure.