The University of Iowa
Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series
Spring 2015
Brazilian Portuguese: VOT, Voicing Duration, and Rate Effects
Robert Morris
Department of Linguistics
Thursday, April 30, 2015
4:00pm
14 EPB
While many claims have been made on the matter, few studies have been done on voice onset
time (VOT) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) stops, with Klein (1999) being apparently the most thorough
study. One goal of this paper is to add to this small body of knowledge by presenting results of two
experiments. First, this paper presents results from an experiment measuring the VOT of utterance-initial
and intervocalic fortis and lenis stops in BP. Stops /b d g/ were found to be generally (pre)voiced with
utterance-initial VOTs ranging from -125 ms to -15 ms utterance initially, whereas /p t k/ were found to
be voiceless and unaspirated with VOTs ranging from 13 ms (bilabials) to 58 ms (velars) in the same
environment. This is in line with traditional descriptions of the language, but these results are relevant for
the study of voicing typology for two reasons. First, many similar two-way contrasts have been described
as “voiced” vs. “voiceless” when the phonetic distinction is not actually voicing, as is the case for many
Germanic languages, in which the contrast is actually one of aspiration (see Iverson and Salmons 1995).
Second, in some languages with “voiced” stops, intervocalic voicing is less robust than in others. Some
researchers attribute this to so-called passive voicing vs. active voicing (Iverson & Salmons 1995; Jessen
and Ringen 2002). Languages with passive voicing have intervocalic voicing that is less robust and more
variable than that of true voice languages with active voicing. I show that BP intervocalic voicing is
robust and compare its behavior to other (presumed) true-voice languages.
The second part of this paper examines the effect of speech rate on VOT in BP. Most previous
research, such as the three-language (English, French, and Thai) study of Kessinger and Blumstein
(1997), has found asymmetric rate effects: as speech rate slows, VOT increases on voiced stops and
voiceless aspirated stops but remains relatively stable on voiceless unaspirated stops. I examine the
effects of speech rate on BP stops. Since BP has prevoiced stops and voiceless unaspirated stops, we
expect that as speech slows, prevoicing will increase, but there will be little change in the VOT for
voiceless unaspirated stops. My BP results are consistent with this preduction. These results are important
phonologically in light of a recent hypothesis that phonologically specified categories are more sensitive
to rate effects (Beckman et al. 2011). If we assume BP /b d g/ are specified for privative [voice] while
/p t k/ are unspecified, we would expect the former to change more than the latter as a function of rate, in
line with both this hypothesis and previous rate-effect research.
Please join us for refreshments before the talk at 3:30 pm in 571 EPB.