Post-Nasal Devoicing and a Probabilistic Model of Phonological Typology

Social Dynamics and Phonological Strength: Post-nasal Devoicing in Tswana

More on post-nasal devoicing: The case of Shekgalagari

Post-nasal voicing is a typologically and historically common process. This process, by which voiceless obstruents become voiced after nasals, has a well-known aerodynamic and perceptual basis: (i) prolonged voicing into the stop closure, vis-à-vis postvocalic stops, due to nasal leakage before full velic closure is achieved and oral cavity expansion due to the velum continuing to raise after v...

Post-Nasal Devoicing as a Sound Change

1.1. Post-nasal voicing (T > D / N ) is well attested and phonetically well motivated, both as a synchronic process and as a sound change. Locke (1983) identifies 15 of 197 languages with synchronic post-nasal voicing (PNV).1 Voicing of stops in post-nasal position is phonetically well motivated: it is the result of a combination of nasal leak and “compression” by the velum (Hayes and Stivers 2...

Post-nasal Devoicing in Tswana

Tswana is traditionally described as having a process of post-nasal stop devoicing (/mba/ → [mpa]). If this description is accurate, then Tswana poses a challenge to views that neutralization processes should be articulatorily grounded. Airflow leakage through the nasal cavity should promote, not inhibit, voicing post-nasally. Zsiga et al. [1] performed an acoustic study of the speech of 6 Tswa...

What it means to be phonetic or phonological: the case of Romanian devoiced nasals

phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e.g. in /basm/ ‘fairy-tale’). Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work inv...