Intervocalic voicing is a process whereby a voiceless segment such as /ptk/ is realized as partially or totally voiced [bdg] when occurring between two vowels. It supposedly happens across-the-board in connected speech, where phonetics is blind to morphological boundaries (in our case, word-edges) but only word-internal intervocalic voicing actually phonologizes, as in Lat. vita → Spa. vida. This means that a change currently happening can be identified if phonetic variation patterns differently at word-edges and word-internally. We provide an analysis of ~1000h of automatically aligned connected speech in five Romance languages to investigate intervocalic voicing of /ptk/ – as well as resistance to devoicing of /bdg/ – as a function of the stop's position in the word, i.e., internal (VCV), initial (V#CV), final (VC#V) and in isolation (V#C#V). Results show that voicing alternations in Portuguese are sensitive to word-edges while French and Romanian are sensitive to the right word-edge only and Italian shows no difference at word-edges or word-internally. However, the surprising result is that word-edges do not only show resistance to intervocalic voicing, but even tend towards devoicing of voiced stops.
Cite as: Hutin, M., Adda-Decker, M., Lamel, L., Vasilescu, I. (2022) When Phonetics Meets Morphology: Intervocalic Voicing Within and Across Words in Romance Languages. Proc. Interspeech 2022, 3438-3442, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10725
@inproceedings{hutin22_interspeech,
author={Mathilde Hutin and Martine Adda-Decker and Lori Lamel and Ioana Vasilescu},
title={{When Phonetics Meets Morphology: Intervocalic Voicing Within and Across Words in Romance Languages}},
year=2022,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2022},
pages={3438--3442},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2022-10725}
}