Voicing and devoicing in Irish English voiced plosives

This study investigates the extent of voicing in the voiced plosives /b, d/ across a range of phonetic contexts in Irish English. Spectrographic and waveform analysis showed that /b, d/ were almost always voiceless sentence-initially, substantially devoiced sentence-finally, and varied considerably sentence-medially. Further analysis of sentencemedial position found that if the plosive was part of a stressed syllable it was substantially less voiced than if it was part of an unstressed syllable. Focus also had an effect: less voicing was found in a nuclear syllable in narrow focus than in broad focus or a deaccented tail. Comparison of these findings with an analogous study [6] of two other varieties of English (Wisconsin and North Carolina) did not verify the hypothesis that Irish English has a greater tendency to devoice medial /b/. Instead, there was a large inter-speaker difference, with two speakers showing devoicing of /b/ frequently and two speakers infrequently.