Dissertation - Michael Becker

following a (non-high) long vowel or a diphthong and least common after the short nonhighvowels. The high vowels, which in Dutch are phonetically short and don’t have longcounterparts, give rise to a rate of voicing alternation that is intermediate between the longvowels and the non-high short vowels. Vowel length, however, is a rather poor predictor ofconsonant voicing in the lexicon: In the GLM statistical analysis that Ernestus & Baayen(2003) report, vowel length has a very modest effect on the voicing of the followingobstruent (p = .053). A comparison of long vowels and high vowels only shows a morerobust effect (p = .017).In the experimental results, the vowel effect was solid (p = .004). Long vowels weresignificantly more conducive to voicing of stem-final obstruents than short vowels of anyheight. There was no significant difference between the short high and short non-highvowels.It is instructive that Dutch speakers imposed a natural trend on the data: The differentvowel qualities of Dutch were abstracted away from, since universally, vowel quality(height, backness, tenseness, roundness) has no power to affect the voicing of a followingconsonant. Only vowel length is universally correlated with voicing, with long vowels(either pure or diphthongal) being conducive to following voiced codas and short vowels tofollowing voiceless codas (Lisker & Abramson 1964; Ohala 1983; Volatis & Miller 1992).Given a family of universal constraints such as {*V:p] σ , *V:t] σ , *V:k] σ }, whichpenalizes voiceless coda obstruents after a long vowel, and the more general family {*b] σ ,*d] σ , *g] σ }, speakers will be able to keep track of alternation rates of obstruents that followlong vowels separately from the alternation rates of obstruents after short vowels.Inthe experiment that Ernestus & Baayen (2003) report, speakers were given bare verbalroots (e.g. de:p), and were asked to add the past tense suffix, which is [-d@] or [-t@].When choosing between the two possible outcomes, [de:p-t@] and [de:b-d@], the root-finalconsonant is guaranteed to be in the coda, and thus its voicing is expected to interact withthe length of the preceding vowel.210