The Even Yearbook 15 (2022)
#116
volume: 15 (2022)
pages: 16–39
author: Zoltán G. Kiss
title: The effect of homophony avoidance in voicing
DOI: http://doi.org/10.57133/evenyrbk.22gk
keywords: voicing contrast, neutralisation, regressive voicing assimilation, minimal pairs, homophony avoidance, Hungarian
abstract: The present study seeks to explore to what extent a particular lexical factor, homophony avoidance, i.e., whether or not a word forms a minimal pair with another word in the lexicon (“minimal pairhood”), affects the realisation of the primary laryngeal feature, the amount of phonation, in the word-final alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ and the fricatives /s/ and /z/ in potentially neutralising and non-neutralising contexts in the speech of Hungarian native speakers. We show with the help of production experiments that the underlyingly voiced obstruents contain more voicing in the case of minimal pairs than in the case of non-minimal pairs, and consequently, minimal pairs are less likely to completely neutralise in speech production. Similarly, the underlyingly voiceless obstruents in minimal pairs were shown to be less voiced before voiced obstruents than in non-minimal pairs, thus the former group is more likely to preserve the voicing contrast. All this suggests that lexical factors, such as homophony avoidance, can override the aerodynamically based phonetic effect of devoicing in utterrance-final position, as well as (de)voicing before a voiceless or a voiced obstruent.
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