14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Predictability of Voicing Assimilation in Speech Production

Mária Gósy (1,2)

(1) Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences;
(2) Eötvös Loránd University;
Budapest, Hungary

During speaking, the mental lexicon is accessed (i) to select the necessary words, and (ii) to retrieve their phonological and syntactic patterns. However, the nature of real-time activation of words and phonological rules is largely unknown. This paper deals with the temporal properties of voicing assimilation (i) in language acquisition, (ii) in spontaneous speech, and (iii) in repetition tasks. Results show that (i) by the age of 4 Hungarian-speaking children acquire this phonological rule without mistakes, (ii) in spontaneous speech if the pause between two words does not exceed 55 ms, voicing assimilation takes place; however, if it exceeds 324 ms, voicing assimilation does not apply, (iii) in repetition tasks subjects retrieved voicing assimilation successfully in about 71% of all possible cases.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Gósy, Mária (1999): "Predictability of voicing assimilation in speech production", In ICPhS-14, 1905-1908.