CRL Newsletter
Vol. 15, No. 1
April 2003
News
Technical Report
A phonetic study of voiced, voiceless and alternating stops in Turkish
Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program, University of California, Los Angeles
In Turkish, there is a process of syllable-final stop devoicing. Many nouns end in stops which surface as voiced when followed by a vowel-initial suffix, but voiceless when they occur syllablefinally or word-finally. This main goal of this study was to investigate whether this devoicing process leads to complete neutralization between devoiced and underlying voiceless stops. Measurements of closure duration and voicing into closure did not differ between stops in these two cases, suggesting that neutralization is indeed complete. However, there are also some words with stops which are not subject to devoicing, suggesting that a three-way lexical distinction between voiced, voiceless and alternating stops is necessary to account for all of the data.