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The pronunciation of voiced obstruents in L2 French: A preliminary study of Swiss German learners

100%
Schmid S.
Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
|
2012
|
vol. 48
627-659
EN
The present study examines how Swiss German learners cope with the contrast between voiced and unvoiced obstruents in L2 French. The feature [±voice]) is not exploited in Swiss German dialects, where pairs of obstruents sharing the same place and manner of articulation are basically differentiated in terms of longer or shorter duration (i.e., the feature [±tense]). Therefore, we expect that Swiss German learners of French would assimilate the non-native feature [±voice] to the native [±tense] contrast, due to the great similarity and the functional equivalence of the two features; devoicing is predicted to occur more often in universally preferred positions such as the prepausal context. The corpus consists of 20 sentences (containing 6 voiced obstruents in 6 different phonotactic contexts), which were read by 10 high school students. An acoustic analysis permitted to categorize the 340 tokens into three discrete types: fully voiced, fully unvoiced, partially voiced. Chi-square tests yielded significant effects of the factors "context", "segment" and "speaker" on the variable "voicing". In particular, speakers pronounced 58% of the intervocalic obstruents as fully voiced, whereas they devoiced 85% of the prepausal tokens (thus, revealing both L1-based and universally preferred patterns).
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Word-Final Obstruent Devoicing in Maltese: Inherited, Internal Development or Contact-Induced?

86%
Avram A. A.
Academic Journal of Modern Philology
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2017
|
vol. 6
23-37
EN
Maltese is a peripheral dialect of Arabic heavily influenced by Sicilian and Italian (see e.g. Krier 1976). Maltese is believed by some to be an offshoot of Sicilian Arabic, but this is subject to debate in the literature (see Isserlin 1977; Brincat 1995; Agius 1996; La Rosa 2014; Avram forthcoming). A characteristic of Maltese phonology is the devoicing of obstruents in word-final position (Cohen 1966; Borg 1975, 1997b). The present paper looks into the possible origins of this phonological rule, i.e. whether it may have been inherited from Sicilian Arabic, whether it is the outcome of an internal development or whether it is a change triggered by contact with Sicilian and Italian. The evidence examined includes transcriptions of personal names and place-names in Greek and Latin documents (see e.g. Cusa 1868; Caracausi 1983; Avram 2012, 2016, forthcoming), the earliest texts in Maltese, and early Arabic loanwords in Sicilian (De Gregorio & Seybold 1903). Also discussed are insights provided by research on language contacts (see e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988) and on second language phonology (see e.g. Flege & Davidian 1984; Fullana & Mora 2009). It is suggested that, as in other peripheral dialects of Arabic, word-final obstruent devoicing in Maltese is a contact-induced change.
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