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