Formalising phonological perception: The role of voicing assimilation in consonant cluster perception in Emilian dialects
Edoardo Cavirani, Silke Hamann
November 2022
 

Speech perception is influenced by language-specific phonological knowledge. While phono- tactics has long been established to play a role, the study of how phonological alternations influence perception is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make a case for the latter by investigating the role of regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) in the perception of obstruent clusters in Emilian dialects of Italian. We provide empirical evidence from a phoneme- detection task, in which Emilian listeners reported to have heard [b] significantly more often in stimuli with a /p/ before a voiced obstruent (RVA context) than before a vowel (non-RVA context). Our experimental findings add to recent work on the influence of phonology on speech perception. In addition, we provide an explicit formalisation, which bolsters the need for a rigid distinction between phonetic, surface and underlying representation, and an explicit mapping between all three, both in the process of speech production and comprehension.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/006948
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Journal of Linguistics
keywords: biphon, emilian dialects, phonetics-phonology interface, regressive voicing assimilation, phonology
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