Authentic and imitated stop consonant realizations in two Norwegian dialects

This study investigates the ability of speakers to imitate features from another dialect of their native language. Speakers from two different Norwegian dialects spoken in Stavanger and Trondheim produced speech material using their own and each other’s dialect. Acoustic analysis involved the realization of lenited fortis stop consonants compared with lenis stops. In general, imitations by both groups were not completely successful. While Trondheim speakers showed insufficient reduction of closure voicing in imitated lenis and lenited stops, Stavanger speakers’ imitations of lenis stops fell short of the Trondheim reference value for voicing. Imitations by both speaker groups were characterized by overshoot in the temporal domain in that V/C duration ratios for imitated lenis as well as lenited fortis stops were larger than the reference values.