phonological transfer of voicing and devoicing rules: evidence from l1 dutch and l2 english...

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Language Sciences 32 (2010) 63–86

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Phonological transfer of voicing and devoicing rules:evidence from L1 Dutch and L2 English conversational speech

Ellen Simon *

English Department, Ghent University, Rozier 44, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Received 24 June 2008; received in revised form 9 October 2008; accepted 27 October 2008

Abstract

This paper examines the productivity of voicing and devoicing rules in Dutch–English interlanguage. In Dutch, but notin English, coda obstruents can be subject to final devoicing and various voice assimilation processes, depending on thecontext. The analysis of a corpus of casual Dutch and English conversational speech of native Dutch speakers revealedthat there are significant differences in the extent to which (de)voicing processes which were produced with a very highfrequency in the native language (L1) are transferred into the second language (L2). These differences are explained in lightof universal principles of markedness. The degree of transfer of intra-word processes is compared to that of cross-wordassimilation processes. Zsiga [Zsiga, E.C., 2003. Articulatory timing in a second language, Studies in Second LanguageAcquisition 25, 399–432] predicts that no language learner should show a preference for transfer of cross-word timing pat-terns over intra-word patterns. It is argued that this hypothesis is not confirmed when learners have received explicitinstruction on the absence of intra-word processes in the L2.� 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Assimilation; Dutch; English; Markedness; Transfer; Voicing

1. Introduction

This study investigates the acquisition of an L2 laryngeal system by advanced late learners and aims to dee-pen our understanding of the mechanism of transfer of phonological properties from the L1 into the L2. Inphonological studies there is general agreement that properties of the first language to some extent influencethe phonological system of the second language (see Eliasson (1984), Weinberger and Ioup (1987), Archibald(1998) for overviews). However, exactly which properties of the L1 are transferred or most likely to be trans-ferred into the L2 is not yet fully understood (see also Curtin et al., 1998). Studies have shown that transferoccurs on the level of phonemic segments (e.g. Lombardi (2003) on L2 substitutions of English interdentalfricatives), phonotactic patterns (e.g. Broselow et al. (1998) on the production of coda obstruents which areillicit in the L1) and prosodic properties (e.g. White and Mattys (2007), on the transfer of L1 rhythm metrics

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doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2008.10.001

* Tel.: +32 4 264 36 47; fax: +32 9 264 41 79.E-mail address: [email protected]

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64 E. Simon / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 63–86

into the L2), to give just a few examples. However, the extent to which post-lexical rules, such as cross-wordassimilations rules, are transferred into the L2 is less well documented. This study deals precisely with theacquisition of assimilation rules, or rather with the acquisition of the absence of L1 phonological rules inthe L2. Specifically, it looks at the acquisition of the English laryngeal system by native speakers of Dutchand investigates to what extent the Dutch speakers learn to suppress the L1 devoicing and voice assimilationrules, which are absent in the target language. It has been argued in earlier studies that ‘‘the kinds of L1 rulesthat cause interference are low level, exceptionless, sensitive to context, and applicable across the board in theL1” (Cebrian, 2000, p. 7, see also Taeldeman, 1993) and cross-word voice assimilations are thus expected to besubject to transfer. In order to examine to what extent devoicing and voicing rules are transferred into the L2,it is of course essential to know how frequently these processes apply in the L1. Owing to the relative com-plexity of voice assimilation in Dutch, it has been described and discussed in many studies (Eijkman, 1937;Blancquaert, 1964; Van den Berg, 1964; Trommelen and Zonneveld, 1979; Zonneveld, 1983; Berendsen,1983; Booij, 1995; Ernestus, 2000). Assimilation rules in dialects of Dutch have been investigated by Leenen(1954), Stroop (1986), De Schutter and Taeldeman (1986) and Weijnen (1991). More phonetic studies on voiceassimilations in Dutch are Slis (1985), Slis and Cohen (1969) and Jansen (2004, 2007a,b). Despite the abun-dance of descriptions of voice assimilations in Dutch, an investigation in how frequently these processes occurin informal conversational speech has, to my knowledge, not been carried out so far. While final obstruentdevoicing is categorical in Dutch, voice assimilation rules across word boundaries are optional. The first stepin this study is to examine the frequency with which optional voice assimilation rules apply in casual runningspeech of native speakers of (Belgian) Dutch.

Once the frequency of a particular process in the L1 is known, it is possible to investigate the extent towhich it is transferred into the interlanguage (henceforth IL). Cebrian (2000) examined the production of finaldevoicing and voice assimilation rules in the English IL of native speakers of Catalan. He found that bothdevoicing and voice assimilation were indeed transferred by the participants, but the former to a much greaterextent than the latter. Cebrian attributed this difference to an IL word-integrity effect against the applicationof rules above the level of the prosodic word. He argues that in earlier studies which report a higher degree oftransfer of voice assimilation rules (Altenberg and Vago, 1983; Rubach, 1984; Sole, 1997) the assimilationapplied between a content word and a grammatical word or clitic, i.e. it did not cross a prosodic word bound-ary. A later study by Zsiga (2003) investigated the production of articulatory overlap in consonants at wordboundaries in L1 English and Russian as well as in the English IL of native speakers of Russian and in theRussian IL of native speakers of English. Whereas in English there is extensive articulatory overlap betweenconsonants at word boundaries, in Russian there is little or no overlap and consonants are audibly released.The analysis of the ILs revealed that L1 English subjects produced a timing pattern that is neither L1- or L2-like, and that L1 Russian speakers did not produce articulatory overlap in L2 English (but audibly releasedstops). This asymmetry was taken to be evidence for Weinberger’s (1994) recoverability principle, which statesthat non-native speakers prefer structures in which contrastive information is maintained. Zsiga notes that thefinding that L1 English speakers transfer intrasegmental timing (such as foot-initial aspiration) into an L2, butdo not transfer cross-word timing patterns is in line with the hypothesis that articulatory constraints withinsmaller constituents are universally more highly ranked than constraints across word boundaries. She furtherargues that

[i]f the hypothesis that smaller prosodic units always display tighter phasing than larger units holds upcrosslinguistically, that leads to the prediction that no language learner will exhibit an ‘‘anti-word-integ-rity” preference—a pattern in which cross-word timing transfers from L1 to L2, but intraword timingdoes not (Zsiga, 2003, p. 424).

Zsiga’s crosslinguistic hypothesis thus predicts that L1 Dutch learners of English will either transfer bothintra-word final devoicing and cross-word voice assimilations or will transfer only final devoicing and not (orto a much lesser extent) voice assimilations, but will not produce voice assimilations and no final devoicingin L2 English. It should be noted that Zsiga’s data were gathered by means of word-reading tasks. WhileZsiga (2003, p. 423) mentions that her data are not disfluent, it remains to be investigated to what extentthis prediction holds in casual conversational speech. This leads to the formulation of the first researchquestion:

E. Simon / Language Sciences 32 (2010) 63–86 65

Research Question 1:

Does the analysis of devoicing and voicing rules in the English conversational IL of L1 Dutch speakersconfirm Zsiga’s prediction that there is an implicational hierarchy which says that if a learner transferscross-word patterns (such as voice assimilations), s/he should also transfer intra-word patterns (such asfinal obstruent devoicing)?

ILs are known to be shaped not only by transfer, but also by universal principles of markedness (see e.g.Major, 2001). The idea that some phenomena in IL cannot be attributed to the source or the target language,but arise from general principles of markedness was first formulated by Eckman (1977) in what he called theMarkedness Differential Hypothesis (later reformulated as the Structural Conformity Hypothesis (Eckman,1984, 1991)). This hypothesis states that those areas in which the source and target language differ will be mostdifficult to acquire (an idea which lay at the basis of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (Lado, 1957)) andthat the degree of difficulty correlates with the degree of markedness. It will be examined to what extent lar-yngeal properties in the English IL of L1 Dutch speakers can be attributed to universal principles of marked-ness, which in the present study are defined in terms of typological relations and are taken to be functionallygrounded in perception and production. Specifically, the study examines whether different voice assimilationrules are transferred to the same extent and whether universal principles of markedness can account for pos-sible differences in productivity. The productivity of an assimilation process is defined here as its capacity to beapplied in another context or another language. It does, in other words, not refer to frequency per se: a processcan be frequent in the L1, but resistant to be transferred to a new language, and hence not flexible or produc-tive. The second research question is thus as follows:

Research Question 2:

Do different cross-word voice assimilation rules differ in productivity (i.e. in the extent to which they aretransferred in an L2) and if so, can these differences be explained by universal markedness hierarchies?

The two research questions are addressed by examining the productions of devoicing and voice assimilationrules in casual running speech in L1 Dutch and L2 English conversations between dyads of Dutch-speakingadvanced learners of English (see Section 3).

2. Background

2.1. Earlier studies on the acquisition of L2 laryngeal systems

Languages differ with respect to the type of laryngeal contrast they have in obstruents. Lisker and Abramson(1964) were the first to characterize stops in terms of the period of voicelessness between the release of the stop(equated with zero) and the onset of voicing, which they called the Voice Onset Time (VOT) and to group lan-guages according to their VOT patterns. They carried out a cross-linguistic study of VOT in stops in threegroups of languages: languages with a two-way laryngeal distinction (American English, Cantonese, Dutch,Hungarian, Puerto Rican Spanish, and Tamil), languages with a three-way distinction (Korean, Eastern Arme-nian, and Thai) and languages with four laryngeal categories (Hindi and Marathi). Stops were classified accord-ing to three conditions of VOT: voicing lead (voicing begins before the release phase of the stops and the VOT isthus negative), short voicing lag (voicing begins shortly after the release of the stop) and long voicing lag (voic-ing begins considerably later than the release of the stop and aspiration is audible). When speakers acquire thelaryngeal system of a second language, they thus may have to learn an extra category or new realisations of thesame categories. Research on L2 acquisition has shown that speakers transfer VOT values from their mothertongue into a second language. Examples are Suomi (1980) on the production of English stops by native speak-ers of Finnish, and Flege et al. (1998) on the production of English stops by L1 Spanish speakers. The role oftransfer in the perception of voice contrasts has been examined by, among others, Flege and Eeftink (1987) onthe perception of English stops by native speakers of Dutch, and Curtin et al. (1998), together with a follow-upstudy by Pater (2003) on the perception of the Thai voice contrast by native speakers of English.

Acquiring the laryngeal system of a second language entails not only the acquisition of a new laryngeal con-trast between segments but also of a new set of processes which alter the laryngeal realisation of segments.


Studies examining the acquisition of L2 assimilation rules are relatively rare. In a recent paper, Darcy et al.(2007) examined the perceptual compensation for assimilation rules in French and English. Assimilation ruleschange segments at boundaries and speakers employ language-specific compensation mechanisms to recoverthe canonical form. Darcy et al. conducted a word detection task with L1 French speakers of English and L1English speakers of French and found that it is possible for advanced L2 learners to develop two separatemechanisms for the perceptual compensation of assimilation rules and switch to the appropriate compensationmechanism when listening to a language. Studies on the acquisition of the production of L2 assimilation rules(Altenberg and Vago, 1983; Rubach, 1984; Sole, 1997; Cebrian, 2000; Lew 2002; Zsiga, 2003; Baelen et al.,2008) agree on the finding that learners transfer L1 assimilation rules into the L2, though they differ somewhatwith respect to the extent of transfer. The results of some of these studies are discussed in later sections.

2.2. The laryngeal systems of Dutch and English

Both Dutch and English have a two-way laryngeal contrast in obstruents. However, the contrast is real-ized in different ways in the two languages. The voice contrast in Dutch stops is one between prevoiced andshort-lag unaspirated stops, while in English it is one between short-lag and long-lag aspirated stops. Simon(in press) examined the acquisition of English laryngeal representations by native speakers of Dutch andfound that the participants learnt to realize long-lag aspirated stops in English, but failed to suppress theproduction of voicing lead in English voiced stops. This difference was attributed to the greater acoustic sal-ience of aspiration in contrast to prevoicing and to the fact that the subjects had been drilled in pronunci-ation classes to produce onset voiceless stops with aspiration in English, but had not been told to omitprevoicing.

Dutch and English also differ with respect to their laryngeal system: while Dutch has a number of ruleswhich change the laryngeal realisation of obstruents at boundaries, in English obstruents are usually realizedaccording to their underlying laryngeal specification. In this paper, the focus lies on four processes, which arebriefly discussed in Sections 2.2.1–2.2.4.

2.2.1. Devoicing of word-final obstruentsDutch is one of the many languages (including German and many Slavic and Turkic languages, see Jansen,

2004, p. 63) in which syllable- and word-final obstruents (both stops and fricatives) are subject to laryngealneutralisation. In Dutch, the process applies both in syllable-final and in word-final position, unless followedby a voiced stop, a vowel or, in some varieties, a sonorant consonant. The following examples are taken fromZonneveld (1983, p. 298) and Trommelen and Zonneveld (1979, p. 100):

(1) rond [t] (‘round’) – ronde [d] (‘round’ - infl. adj.)(2) huis [s] (‘house’)1 – huizen [z] (‘houses’)2

In contrast to Dutch, the voice contrast is maintained in utterance-final position in English, i.e. there is nofinal laryngeal neutralisation of stops or fricatives, as is clear from the existence of minimal pairs such as bed–

bet, bid–bit, bide–bite, kid–kit, cub–cup, his–hiss, leave–leaf and so on. It is, of course, well known that word-final stops in English are frequently unreleased in casual speech (e.g. Tsukada et al., 2004) and that the mostimportant cue to the voice character of word-final obstruents in English is the length of the preceding vowel,which is shorter before voiceless obstruents than before voiced ones (House and Fairbanks, 1953; Mack,1982).

1 In contrast to stops, the underlying form of fricatives is not reflected in the spelling of the final fricative. However, the phonotactics ofDutch disambiguate the voice character of the fricative: if the vowel is long, it is followed by a voiced fricative (except in a number ofexceptions); if it is short, it is followed by a voiceless fricative (Booij, 1995, pp. 34–35).

2 It should be noted that in some areas, especially in the western part of the Netherlands, all fricatives are voiceless and hence evenintervocalic fricatives in words like ‘huizen’ may be realized with [s] rather than [z] by some speakers (Slis and Van Heugten, 1989; Van deVelde et al., 1995; Kissine et al., 2005).


2.2.2. Regressive voice assimilation before onset voiced stops

In Dutch, word-final obstruents are voiced when preceding word-initial voiced stops (see Trommelen andZonneveld, 1979, p. 106; Collier and Droste, 1982, p. 35; Slis, 1985, p. 122 and Booij, 1995, p. 59).3 Regressivevoice assimilation applies both word-internally (in compounds and derivations, as in (3) (taken from Booij,1995, p. 59) and across word boundaries (4).

(3) misdaad [z] (mis + daad, ‘crime’) /mIsda:d/ ? [0mIzda:t](4) twaalf dozen [vd] (‘twelve boxes’) /twa:lf do:zEn/ ? [twa:lv 0do:zE]

Whereas in Dutch, voiceless obstruents become voiced when followed by a voiced stop, this is not the casein English. Examples are the following:

(5) get better /get 0betE/ ? [get 0betE] (and not *[ged 0betE])(6) if Davy /If 0deIvi/ ? [If 0deIvi] (and not *[Iv 0deIvi])

In word-internal position, regressive voice assimilation to voicedness is occasionally possible in English, butonly in a limited number of lexical items. Jansen (2004, p. 124), for instance, notes that the fricative in theprefix mis- does not become voiced preceding a voiced obstruent, in contrast to the fricative in dis- (e.g. mis-

guided [s] vs. disguised [z]), though it should be noted that there is some accent variation with respect to thevoicing in these prefixes. Jansen also mentions examples like Osborne [zb], Osgood [z], Marsden [zd] and Neas-den [zd], which are all normally realised with a voiced fricative, in contrast to, for instance, Oscar [sk] andosprey [sp], in which the syllable-final fricative is voiceless. This type of coarticulation is lexically restrictedand is thus different from regressive voice assimilation in Dutch, which can apply whenever the context allowsit.

2.2.3. Voicing of final fricatives preceding word-initial vowels

In Dutch, but not in English, coda fricatives are often realized as voiced when preceded by a sonorant con-sonant or a vowel and followed by a vowel (e.g. Collins and Mees, 1999, p. 214). This process is frequent inStandard Dutch, as well as in the Belgian Dutch dialects (including East- and West-Flemish), where the fric-ative (which can be voiced or voiceless in the underlying form) is normally realized as voiced in prevocalicposition. The following examples are taken from De Schutter and Taeldeman (1986):

(7) ons oud huis (< onze) /Anz aft/ ? [Anz aft]‘our old house’

(8) dat hij braaf is (< brave) /bra:v Is/ ? [bra:v Is]‘that he’s sweet’

2.2.4. Regressive voice assimilation before word-initial sonorant consonants

In Standard Dutch and East-Flemish, obstruents do not normally become voiced before sonorant conso-nants. Regressive voice assimilation is, however, reported to occur systematically in West-Flemish word-finalfricative + word-initial sonorant consonant clusters (De Schutter and Taeldeman, 1986; Weijnen, 1991). Thefollowing example is taken from De Schutter and Taeldeman (1986, p. 112):

(9) zes jaar /zes ja:r/ ? East-Flemish/Standard Dutch: [zes ja:r], West-Flemish: [zez ja:r]‘six years’

3 Whereas the default pattern in Dutch obstruent clusters is regressive voice assimilation, progressive devoicing occurs in phrases inwhich a coda obstruent is followed by a word-initial fricative (Trommelen and Zonneveld, 1979, p. 130; Collier and Droste, 1982, p. 35;Booij, 1995, p. 58; Collins and Mees, 1999, p. 212). Because in those cases the onset rather than the coda obstruent is affected, it is not dealtwith in this paper.


In the Dutch-speaking area, regressive voice assimilation is only frequent in West-Flanders (except in theextreme south-east), in Zeeland (a province of the Netherlands, also called Zealand in English) (De Schutterand Taeldeman, 1986, pp. 111–112) and in the dialect of Amsterdam (Gussenhoven and Broeders, 1997). InEnglish, there is no regressive assimilation in clusters containing a voiceless obstruent (stop or fricative) fol-lowed by a sonorant consonant across word boundaries.

The following section discusses the method used to examine to what extent the above mentioned processesare produced in L1 Dutch and L2 English.

3. Method

3.1. Participants

The participants were 16 native speakers of Dutch living in Flanders, aged between 19 and 21. They camefrom two different dialect areas in Flanders: eight of the participants came from East-Flanders, the other eightfrom West-Flanders. The areas East- and West-Flanders are adjacent and situated in the north-western part ofBelgium. Participants from these two Belgian Dutch dialect areas were selected, because the East- and West-Flemish dialects spoken in these regions differ with respect to the realisation of word-final fricatives followedby word-initial sonorant consonants. Each region was represented by an equal number of male and femalespeakers.

All participants were studying English at university and had taken English pronunciation sessions in theyear preceding the recordings, in which they individually listened to pronunciation tapes, recorded theirown speech and listened back to what they had recorded. Though there are of course differences betweenthe participants as far as their English pronunciation is concerned, all participants had attained the level atwhich they can express themselves fluently in the foreign language and can be said to have an advanced pro-nunciation, which is defined by Fraser as

4 Thtook precordmay inall infotheir p

‘‘pronunciation [which is] easy for a person with moderate goodwill to understand, though with a notice-able foreign accent and the occasional mispronounced word” (Fraser, 2001, p. 72).

3.2. Procedure

A spoken corpus with comparable data in L1 Dutch and L2 English was compiled, which contains spon-taneous conversations between dyads of participants. Eight dyads of participants were asked to talk to eachother for about 30–45 min about any subject they liked. This procedure elicited rapid and natural speech,which was the desired effect, as the occurrence of assimilations is known to be more frequent in rapid thanin slow, deliberate speech (Slis, 1985). For each dyad two conversations were recorded: the first conversationwas in Dutch and the second one in English.4 Collecting data in both the participants’ L1 and in their L2 wasof crucial importance, as it allowed us to determine the frequency of the laryngeal rules in the L1 and theextent to which they were transferred into the L2. The recordings took place in a sound-attenuated roomand a microphone was placed on the table between the participants.

While casual conversations form the main part of the data, ten out of the 16 participants who participatedin the spontaneous conversations also performed an individual reading task. The participants were asked toread aloud 40 Dutch and an equal number of English words in isolation. In order to have some control overspeech rate, the words appeared one at a time (every 3 seconds) on a computer screen. The tokens in the word

is order was always respected, as it allowed the participants to get to know one another a little before the second recording sessionlace, so that the threshold to speak English to each other was lowered. No third person was present in the room during theings, as that would have decreased the casualness of the conversations. While having a Dutch conversation before an English onecrease the likelihood of transfer from the L1, the order of the conversations was held constant for all informants and thus influencedrmants equally, if at all. The participants knew that the conversations would be used for linguistic analysis, but did not know thatronunciation was the focus of attention.


reading task were coded on the basis of auditory judgements, though for unclear cases the waveforms andspectrograms were also consulted.

3.3. Data analysis

Fifteen minutes of each conversation were orthographically transcribed in Praat (Boersma and Weenink,2008). This led to a total of 120 min of running speech in L1 Dutch and the same in L2 English. All possiblefinal devoicing and voice assimilation sites were selected from the continuous streams of speech and were sub-sequently coded and fed into a database. If a pause occurred between two words, this was not counted as apossible assimilation site. If the voice character of a final stop was hard to determine because it was, forinstance, unreleased or replaced by a glottal stop, the token was not included in the analysis. A consequenceof the absence of control over which words or phrases the subjects uttered is that the number of possibledevoicing and voice assimilation sites for each process as well as the number of phrases in which a phonemeoccurred in a particular context vary greatly. This is an automatic consequence of collecting truly natural andcasual speech.

The presence and absence of devoicing and voice assimilation processes in the casual conversations werecoded on the basis of auditory judgements and this for three reasons:

First, coding the tokens on the basis of perception rather than on acoustic measurements has the advantageof being closer to the process that happens in normal communication, in which listeners do not have access to,for instance, exact voice onset time durations. Cebrian (2000, p. 11) argues that

5 It sassimilagreem

judging voicing on the basis of perception is representative of the way sounds are heard in everydayspeech situations and mispronunciations due to nonnative voicing patterns contribute considerably tothe perception of accented speech.

While it can be argued that transcribers might, for instance, be biased by their expectations or their L1 (andin the present study, the transcriber was a native speaker of Dutch, familiar with English-accented Dutch),research has shown that the influence of these expectations can be minimised when transcribers shift theirattention from the semantic to the segmental level (cf. Cucchiarini, 1993, p. 45 and references therein). Thecoding of the tokens was based on a classification of the segments involved as either voiced or voiceless, whichof course ‘‘requires the imposition of a threshold on the voiceless–voiced ‘continuum’” (Docherty, 1992, p. 6).Whereas it needs to be kept in mind that the phonetic realisation of the tokens was not necessarily fully voicedor fully voiceless, the tokens were coded on the basis of perception, which typically is categorical (see alsoDarcy et al., 2007). The coding method thus most closely resembles what happens in real communicationsituations.

Secondly, the main part of the data used for this study is formed by spontaneous conversations. Whereasthe acoustic analysis of isolated words can be straightforward (which is why most studies deal with these), it ismuch more complicated to measure running speech acoustically. Moreover, although the quality of therecordings is good, some background noise (e.g. participants tapping with their fingers on the table) mightbe problematic for carrying out reliable acoustic measurements. The voiced/voiceless-distinction has, forinstance, proven to be one of the problem areas in automatic transcription. A study by Binnenpoorte et al.(2004), in which an automatically generated phonetic transcription of spontaneous Dutch speech is comparedwith a human phonetic transcription, shows that the automatic transcriber did not approximate human-likeperformance in distinguishing voiced from voiceless segments.

Thirdly, one tenth of the tokens were also coded by a second, phonetically trained transcriber who, like theauthor, was a native speaker of Dutch. The interrater agreement was calculated on the basis of the coefficientkappa (cf. Eggen and Sanders, 1993) and proved to be 0.92 for Dutch and 0.83 for English, which is an ‘almostperfect’ agreement according to the interpretation table of the coefficient kappa by Landis and Koch (1977)and indicates that the coding was reliable.5

hould be noted that both transcribers coded a larger number of processes than discussed in this paper (i.e. deletions, progressiveations and glottal replacements in addition to final devoicings, regressive and prevocalic voice assimilations) and that the raterent was calculated on the basis of all codings.

Table 1Coda obstruents in prepausal position: group results.

Environment Voiceless production Voiced production

Raw fig. % Raw fig. %

vcd. stop]_## 40/97 41 57/97 59vcd. fric.]_## 150/200 75 50/200 25total: vcd. O]_## 190/297 64 107/297 36


4. Results

Final devoicing, regressive assimilation before voiced stops and voicing of prevocalic fricatives occur bothin East- and West-Flemish and hence the results for both groups are taken together. Assimilation of fricativespreceding sonorant consonants is discussed for the two groups separately, since it occurs in West-Flemish, butnot in East-Flemish.

4.1. Final devoicing

In order to investigate whether the participants transferred the process of laryngeal neutralisation from theirmother tongue into English, all voiced obstruents which occurred in utterance-final position in the L2 Englishconversations were coded. (Since prepausal voiced obstruents are never realised as voiced in Dutch, they werenot coded in the Dutch conversations.) Table 1 presents the results for prepausal stops and fricatives.

The results in Table 1 show that, in total, 97 tokens were coded which ended in a voiced stop and werefollowed by a pause. Devoicing of the final stop occurred in 40 of these 97 tokens (41%). Devoicing of fric-atives was much more frequent: as much as 150 out of 200 prepausal voiced fricatives (75%) were devoiced.It should be noted that the raw figures and percentages in Table 1 present the frequency with which codaobstruents were realized as voiced or voiceless by the group as a whole. Individual differences, which aremasked by the group results in Table 1, are in fact irrelevant to the present study’s aim of comparing the per-formance of the same group on different processes. However, while Table 1 presents the data in an intuitivelyappealing way, the comparisons might be a bit misleading, since the different participants contribute unevenlyto cells, with some participants being responsible for a larger part of the data than others. Although there isindependence of observations across cells, there is no independence of observations within each cell and chi-square tests are thus invalid. It was therefore decided to look at the data in a different way. To illustrate this,Table 2 presents the number of voiced and voiceless realisations of prepausal fricatives for each participant.

The raw data in Table 2 were then transformed into percentage data and—together with the results for codastops—presented in Table 3.6 In Table 3 and in all tables in the remainder of this paper, an empty cell indicatesthat there are no data for a particular participant in the context discussed.

Table 3 shows that stops were devoiced significantly more frequently than fricatives, as was shown by aone-tailed paired t test (t = 2.52, df = 14, p = 0.012 < 0.05).7 The following examples from the corpus illustratedevoicing of stops (10) and fricatives (11).

(10) yesterday, I got this uh.. mail from a friend. . . /frend/ ? [frent] (EF)8

(11) because. . .I wasn’t.. good /bI0kAz/ ? [bI0kAs] (WF)

6 While calculating the data in the way suggested does not reflect the uneven number of possible devoicing/voice assimilation sites in thespeech of the individual participants, it does allow each informant to contribute equally to the data set. If the data for all the participantswould be pooled and percentages calculated for all participants together, participants with many devoicing/voice assimilation sites willcontribute much more than participants with few possible (de)voicing sites.

7 A paired t test was needed here, since it is a repeated measures design, in which a single participant provides two separate values. Thisalso means that only participants with values for both stops and fricatives are taken into account. Since participants did not produce anequal number of possible devoicing sites for stops and fricatives, the t test is carried out on percentage data for individual informantsrather than on raw data. All statistical tests were performed using SPSS.

8 After each example phrase from the corpus, the letters between brackets indicate whether the utterance was produced by a West-Flemish (WF) or East-Flemish (EF) participant.

Table 2Coda fricatives in prepausal position: raw data.

Inf. no. vcd(+)/vcl(�) Number ofoccurrences

1 + 2� 18

2 + 2� 12

3 + 3� 9

4 + 22� 16

5 + 0� 3

6 + 2� 12

7 + 2� 4

8 + 0� 13

9 + 4� 17

10 + 1� 2

11 + 5� 5

12 + 3� 1

13 + 2� 6

14 + 1� 6

15 + 0� 16

16 + 1� 10

Total 200


The word reading task also contained five words ending in a voiced alveolar stop, namely bid, did, bed, bide

and died, read by ten participants (i.e. 50 possible devoicing sites). Only eight out of the 50 tokens were real-ized with final devoicing (e.g. did was realized as [dIt]), five of which were produced by the same participant.Although final voiced stops become partially devoiced in English as well, the devoiced stops in the Englishwords read by the participants share with the voiceless stop the more explosive burst and greater energy.Two participants very audibly released the final alveolar stops in a total of six tokens, so that (a hint of) afinal schwa could be perceived and was visible on the spectrogram, as in bid [bIdE], did [dIdE] and died [daIdE].

One could argue that, in order to know whether learners have acquired the laryngeal contrast in codaobstruents in English, the length of the preceding vowel should also be taken into account, as this is the pri-mary acoustic cue to the voice character of the final obstruent for native speakers of English.

Therefore, the vowel length in three minimal pairs in the word reading task was measured, namely in bet–

bed, bit–bid, and bite–bide. The results are presented in Table 4.The participants produced all three words ending in a voiced stop with a significantly longer vowel than the

words ending in a voiceless stop (p < .01) and have thus learnt that vowel length is an important acoustic cuein English, at least when performing a word reading task.

Since we want to compare the performance of the same group of participants on different processes, thequestion needs to be asked whether the participants as a group have learnt the voice contrast in coda obstru-ents in English or not. For fricatives, the answer seems to be obvious: since the participants devoiced 76% of

Table 3Coda obstruents in prepausal fricatives: percentage data.

Participant stop]_## fricative]_##

1 87.5 902 68.8 85.73 33.3 754 12.5 42.15 25 1006 50 85,77 75 66.78 20 1009 0 8110 66.711 100 5012 33 2513 25 7514 100 85.715 0 10016 100 90.9

Mean 48.67 76.22na 97 200SD 39.40 24,21

t (one-tail) 2.52df 14p 0.012 < 0.05

a n = the number of observations (i.e. possible devoicing sites).

Table 4Pre-stop vowel length (in ms).

bet–bed bit–bid bite–bide

Mean difference in V length 60.9 49.2 118SD 51.6 46.5 72.0t 3.73 3.35 5.16p 0.002 0.004 0.000


prepausal fricatives, we can conclude that they do not master the voice contrast in coda fricatives in English.For stops, the situation is less clear. The participants devoice coda stops in 49% of the tokens in thespontaneous conversations and in 8% of the tokens in a word-reading task. The criterion level to determinewhether a particular L2 structure has been acquired is necessarily arbitrary and different criterion levels (rang-ing from a correct occurrence in 90% of the tokens to a level of only 60% correct responses) have been pro-posed (Lakshmanan and Selinker 2001, p. 401). Since the participants produced target L2 voiced stops asvoiced in 51% of the tokens in the conversations and in 92% of the tokens in the word-reading task, this indi-cates that they have clearly learnt to suppress final devoicing to some extent in controlled conditions. It isknown that the more attention is paid to form, the higher the chance that the learner will succeed in the pho-netic implementation of the newly acquired structure (Archibald, 1998, p. 7). The difference in final devoicingrate in the conversations and in the word-reading task seems to indicate that the learners have learnt thecontrast but fail to phonetically implement it when they are paying minimal attention to pronunciation, i.e.the high percentage of devoicings in the conversations is the result of lack of mastery and not lack ofknowledge.

4.2. Regressive voice assimilation before voiced stops

In total 373 Dutch and 254 English tokens were coded in which a word-final obstruent is followed by aword-initial voiced stop. Fig. 1 presents the voiced realisations of all word-final (underlyingly voiced and

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vcd. stop vcd. fric. vcl. stop vcl. fric.

coda C preceding onset vcd. stop

%

L1 DutchL2 English

Fig. 1. Voiced realisations of obstruents preceding onset voiced stops.


voiceless) stops and fricatives followed by a word-initial voiced stop. (The percentage results are derived fromthe individual percentages based on the raw data in the same way that the data in Table 3 were derived fromTable 2. For a table with the statistical results see Appendix A).

Two main observations can be made on the basis of Fig. 1.First, when we compare the voiced realisations in L1 Dutch and L2 English, it is clear that they are more

frequent in Dutch than in English. The difference is significant in all contexts (p < 0.05), except in the contextof a coda voiced stop followed by an onset voiced stop (one-tailed t = 1.000, df = 7, p = 0.175), in which oneparticipant produced one out of two tokens with a voiceless stop in Dutch. Since in L1 English word-finalvoiced and voiceless obstruents are expected to be realized according to their underlying voice specificationwhen followed by a word-initial voiced stop and the participants realized 63.14% of coda voiceless stopsand 54.25% of coda voiceless fricatives as voiced in this context, this means that they transfer their L1 assim-ilation pattern into English to a very great extent, though do not produce it as frequently as in their L1. Twoexamples of assimilations are given in (12) (L1 Dutch) and (13) (L2 English):

(12) ee(n) volledige rode streep door

/stre:p do:r/ ? [stre:b do:r] (EF)‘a full red line through’

(13) and and also uh on the uhm.. difference between. . .uhm/0dIfrEns bE0twi:n/ ? [0dIfrEnz bE0twi:n] (EF)

Examples (12) and (13) illustrate that assimilation also occurred between content words (other examplesfrom the corpus are regressive assimilation in lot better [lAd 0bedEr], last day [lA:zd_deI] and Spanish girls

[0sp�nIZ gf:lz]) and not just in host + clitic combinations, as suggested by Cebrian (2000) (see Section 1,Introduction).

Secondly, the data reveal that voiced realisations of both stops and fricatives are frequent in Dutch, inde-pendent of whether the coda obstruent is voiced or voiceless in the underlying form. Coda stops were realizedas voiced in 88.89% of the tokens when they were voiced in the underlying form and in 82.14% when they werevoiceless in the underlying form, a difference which is not significant (one-tailed t = 0.649, df = 8, p = 0.267).The same is true for fricatives: fricatives preceding voiced stops were realized as voiced in 95.45% of the tokenswhen voiced in the underlying form and in 94.96% of the cases when voiceless in the underlying form (one-tailed t = 0.347, df = 10, p = 0.368). This observation for Dutch contrasts with what we find in the L2 Englishdata, in which obstruents were realized as voiced significantly more frequently when voiced in the underlyingform than when voiceless in the underlying form (for stops: one-tailed t = 5.428, df = 13, p = 0.000; for fric-atives: one-tailed t = 3.803, df = 10, p = 0.002).


4.3. Voicing of fricatives in prevocalic position

In order to investigate whether the Dutch-speaking participants transferred voice assimilations in prevo-calic position from Dutch into English, in which it does not occur, 504 tokens (87 in Dutch and 417 in English)containing a final voiced fricative followed by a vowel and 535 tokens (368 in Dutch and 167 in English) con-taining a word-final voiceless fricative preceding a vowel were coded. On closer inspection, it appeared that inseven of the Dutch tokens and in 85 of the English tokens, the fricative was /s/ preceded by an obstruent.Because no assimilation occurred in any of the tokens in which a final fricative was preceded by an obstruent,these tokens are not dealt with in the discussion below.

Fig. 2 shows the voiced realisations of prevocalic fricatives following a sonorant consonant or a vowel inthe Dutch and English conversations for all participants (cf. Appendix B).

Examples of intervocalic voice assimilation are given in (14) (L1 Dutch) and (15) (L2 English):

(14) pas op, da’s wel, allez, da’s wel grappig ze, maa(r).. /pAz ¿p/ ? [pAz ¿p] (EF)‘mind you, it’s, well, it’s kind of funny, but..’

(15) it’s much easier to wash it /wAR

It/ ? [wAZ It] (EF)

Fig. 2 shows that voiced fricatives preceding word-initial vowels were realized as voiced in 90.06% of theDutch tokens and in 81.78% of the English ones. A paired t test revealed that this difference was not significant(one-tailed t = 1.547, df = 14, p = 0.072). While the voiced realisations in Dutch are the result of prevocalicvoice assimilation, in English they may be either the result of transfer of this L1 assimilation rule or of faith-fulness to the target L2 form. Voiceless fricatives were realized as voiced in 84.79% of the tokens in Dutch, butonly in 20.68% of the English tokens (t = 9.428, df = 15, p = 0.000). This means that, even though there issome transfer of the L1 voice assimilation rule, the participants have learnt to produce prevocalic voicelessfricatives as voiceless in English in the overall majority of cases.

4.4. Voicing of fricatives before sonorant consonants

Fig. 3 presents the frequency of voiced realisations of coda (voiced and voiceless) fricatives following asonorant and preceding onset sonorant consonants in the Dutch (L1) and English (L2) conversations (see alsoAppendix C). The letters EF and WF stand for the East- and West-Flemish group.

Levene’s tests were carried out for all four comparisons and revealed that there was homogeneity ofvariance in the two groups as the F values were each time greater than 0.05 (see Appendix C). Independent

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coda C preceding word-initial vowel

%

L1 Dutch

L2 English

vcd. fric. vcl. fric.

Fig. 2. Prevocalic voicing of fricatives.

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L1 EF L1 WF L2 EF L2 WF

%

vcd. fric.vcl. fric.

Fig. 3. Voiced realisations of coda fricatives preceding onset sonorant consonants.


samples t tests could therefore be carried out.9 One-tailed t tests were conducted as it was – on the basis of theliterature – predicted that the West-Flemish participants would produce more voiced realisations than theEast-Flemish participants.

Fig. 3 shows that coda fricatives preceding sonorant consonants in Dutch were realized as voiced more fre-quently by the West-Flemish than by the East-Flemish participants. The difference between the two groupswas highly significant when the fricative was voiced in the underlying form (t = 5.126, df = 12, p = 0.000)as well as when it was voiceless (t = 7.962, df = 14, p = 0.000). Here is an example from the L1 Dutch corpus:

(16) voo(r) zes maanden

/zes 0ma:ndEn/ ? [zez 0 ma:ndn] (WF)‘for six months’

When we look at the L2 English results we see that the East-Flemish participants produced voiced fricativesbefore onset sonorant consonants as voiced in 59.96% of the tokens, while the West-Flemish participants pro-duced voiced fricatives in 79.10% of the tokens. The difference between East- and West-Flemish participants inthe realisation of coda fricatives preceding onset sonorant consonants is thus not maintained when the codafricative is voiced in the underlying form (t = 1.450, df = 14, p = 0.085). While the target English realisationwith a voiced fricative is the same as the West-Flemish’ speakers L1 form, it is not the same as the L1 form ofthe East-Flemish speakers, who devoiced fricatives in 85.57% of the tokens. When the final fricative was voice-less, regressive voice assimilation occurred in 6.25% of the tokens produced by the East-Flemish participantsand in 27.91% of the tokens produced by the West-Flemish participants, a difference which proved to be sig-nificant (t = 2.000, df = 14, p = 0.033). The following phrases illustrate the process of regressive voice assim-ilation in fricative + sonorant consonant clusters across word boundaries in the L2 English conversations:

(17) if you really live...few months in England /If ju:/ ? [Iv ju:] (WF)(18) yes, we’re gonna have these arguments /jes wir/ ? [jez wi:r] (WF)

When the coda fricative was voiceless in the underlying form, only one East-Flemish participant producedone out of two tokens with voicing. The West-Flemish participants produced voice assimilation in significantlymore tokens than the East-Flemish group, though the percentage of voiced realisations (27.91%) is muchsmaller than when the coda fricative was voiced in the underlying form (79.10%).

9 Independent rather than paired t tests are now needed, aswe are comparing the differences between two independent groups, the East-and West-Flemish participants.

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

O]_[vcd. stop fric.]_[vowel fric.]_[son. C

%

Fig. 4. Production of voice assimilation processes in Dutch conversations between the West-Flemish participants.


4.5. Frequency of optional voice assimilation processes in the L1

This section aims to answer the question to what extent optional voice assimilation processes actually occurin casual running speech of young native speakers of Dutch in Belgium (see Section 1). Fig. 4 summarizes theresults of the production of the three voice assimilation processes discussed: (1) regressive assimilation in codaobstruents followed by onset voiced stops, (2) prevocalic voicing of fricatives, and (3) voicing of fricatives pre-ceding onset sonorant consonants. In order to be able to compare the frequency with which the different pro-cesses occurred in Dutch, the results of only the West-Flemish participants are presented, as voicing offricatives before sonorant consonants was not (or hardly) produced by the East-Flemish participants. Thedata for coda obstruents which are voiced in the underlying form and those which are voiceless are takentogether (see also Appendix D).

The analysis shows that all three voice assimilation processes were very frequently produced in the Dutchconversations between the young native speakers. While utterance-final devoicing in Dutch is exceptionless,the three optional voicing processes also proved to be very strongly present in running Dutch speech: fric-atives were realized as voiced in 83.2% of the tokens preceding voiced stops, in 79% of the phrases precedinga vowel and in 79.6% of the tokens preceding a sonorant consonant. In order to make a three-value com-parison, a repeated measures ANOVA was carried out. For the results of an ANOVA to be valid, a test ofsphericity needs to be conducted. In the case at hand, Mauchly’s test of sphericity revealed that p = 0.127,so the sphericity assumption is not violated. The repeated measures ANOVA revealed that there was nosignificant difference between these processes in terms of the frequency with which they applied in Dutch(F = 0.195, p = 0.825 > 0.05). Thus voicing assimilation before sonorant consonants, which occurs inWest-Flemish, but not in Standard Dutch, was not produced significantly less frequently than the othertwo processes, which also apply in Standard Dutch. Since all participants were asked to speak the varietyof Dutch they felt most comfortable in, the varieties of Dutch used in the conversations vary considerably,ranging from strongly dialectal to close to Standard Dutch. However, since voice assimilation before sono-rant consonants is a highly unconscious process, it is likely to persist in the transfer from dialect to Stan-dard Dutch (see Taeldeman (1993) on criteria for dialect persistence). Thus, even though some of the West-Flemish participants spoke a variety of Dutch closer to the standard variety than their own broad dialect,they very frequently produced processes of assimilation before sonorant consonants, which do not occur inStandard Dutch.

5. Discussion

In the discussion we go back to the two research questions formulated in Section 1.


5.1. Transferability of intra- vs. cross-word voicing patterns

The first research question was whether Zsiga’s (2003) hypothesis that there should be no language learnerwho transfers L1 timing patterns across word boundaries but not within words finds support in the presentstudy on casual running speech. The hypothesis predicts that intra-word processes, such as final devoicing,are always transferred to a greater extent than cross-word assimilation processes, such as voice assimilations.

The analysis of voiced obstruents in the L2 English conversations revealed that both stops and fricativeswere frequently devoiced in prepausal position, but that devoicing of fricatives (76.22%) was significantly morefrequent than devoicing of stops (48.67%). The difference in the extent to which stops and fricatives weredevoiced presumably needs to be ascribed to the aerodynamic difficulty in producing voicing in final fricatives(see e.g. Smith, 1997, pp. 472–473; Jansen, 2004, p. 40). For the production of vocal fold vibration, the glottishas to be adducted and the supraglottal pressure has to remain lower than the subglottal pressure. The pro-duction of friction, on the other hand, requires a sufficient airflow through the glottis, which leads to a quickincrease in intra-oral air pressure. Moreover, the glottis has to be slightly spread in order to allow for friction,but a slightly too open glottis causes the vocal folds to stop vibrating. This phonetic conflict explains whyvoiced fricatives are often devoiced, considered to be more marked than voiced stops and absent in many lan-guages of the world (Ohala, 1983). The fact that voiced fricatives are more marked than voiced stops ismasked in Dutch in coda position, in which neither voiced stops nor voiced fricatives are allowed, as wellas in English, in which voiced stops as well as voiced fricatives occur in the coda. It does, however, to someextent emerge in the English IL of the participants. Effects of emergence of the unmarked (a term used in Opti-mality Theory, see McCarthy and Prince, 1994) in IL phonology have also been observed by Broselow et al.(1998).

We then turn to the production of regressive voice assimilation before voiced stops and compare the resultswith those of word-final devoicing.

When we look at the realisation of coda voiced obstruents preceding onset voiced stops in the English con-versations, the results showed that none of the voiced stops and only 8.2% of the voiced fricatives weredevoiced by the participants. This stands in sharp contrast to the realisation of prepausal voiced stops andfricatives, which were devoiced in 48.67% and 76.22%, respectively. The much lower degree of final devoicingin coda voiced obstruents followed by a voiced stop is thus presumably the result of positive transfer of voiceassimilation. Positive transfer of this type was also found by Cebrian (2000) in the English IL of L1 Catalanspeakers. Cebrian (2000, p. 18) notes

An interesting consequence of the interference of L1 patterns in the IL is the fact that, as a result of thepositive transfer from the L1, targetlike pronunciation may be fortuitously produced. The same targetvoiced obstruent may be voiced in an L1 voicing environment but voiceless in an L1 devoicing environ-ment. For example, learners may accidentally produce a voiced alveolar fricative in nosebleed but fail todo so when saying the word nose in isolation.

While final devoicing is a strong process in Dutch, which is transferred into English, the participants’ ten-dency to transfer regressive voice assimilation is also very strong and overrules the pressure towards voicelesscoda obstruents.

Fig. 5 compares the frequency with which the participants produced voicing of coda voiceless obstruentsbefore voiced stops with the frequency of prepausal coda devoicing in the English conversations (see alsoAppendix E).

Since coda obstruents in English are realized according to their underlying voice specification both in pre-pausal context and when preceding a voiced stop and neither process thus applies in L1 English, the percent-age data in Fig. 5 are all instances of negative transfer. The results indicate that both prepausal final devoicingand regressive voice assimilation are very frequently transferred into English, leading to high percentages ofnon-targetlike forms (see Appendix E for exact percentages). The high frequency of voicing of coda obstruentspreceding onset voiced stops indicates that the pressure from the L2 to preserve the voice contrast in codaobstruents and the pressure from the L1 to produce coda obstruents as voiceless are—in more than half ofthe tokens—overruled by the Dutch speakers’ tendency to produce regressive voice assimilation before voicedstops. Cebrian (2000) found that word-internal obstruent devoicing was transferred to a much greater extent

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vcd. stop]_## vcl. stop]_[vcd. stop vcd. fric.]_## vcl. fric.]_[vcd. stop

%

Fig. 5. Comparison between word-internal final devoicing and cross-word voicing assimilation.


than cross-word voice assimilations and ascribed this to the existence of a general IL constraint against theapplication of rules above the level of the prosodic word. The production of devoicing and voice assimilationsin the L2 English conversations in the present study did not provide evidence for a word-integrity effect.Regressive voice assimilations across word boundaries were produced very frequently and also occurredbetween content words and not just between a host and a clitic.

The data in Fig. 5, based on group results, thus indicate that learners’ tendency to produce cross-word voiceassimilation was not less strong than their tendency to devoice word-final coda obstruents. In fact, two-tailedpaired t tests revealed that neither for stops nor for fricatives one process was produced significantly more fre-quently than the other. One reason for the finding that final devoicing was not transferred to a greater extentthan regressive voice assimilation may be that it is one of the topics dealt with in the pronunciation classes theparticipants took in the year preceding the recordings. In these classes, the participants’ attention was explic-itly drawn to the difference between Dutch and English realisations of final obstruents. While no conversationswere recorded before the participants followed a pronunciation training, and hence we cannot compare theresults before and after training, it seems that the explicit instruction on the absence of final devoicing in Eng-lish had some positive results for stops, which were devoiced significantly less frequently than fricatives, asdiscussed above. The low percentage of devoicing of stops in the word-reading task (2%) is in line with thehypothesis that explicit pronunciation training is responsible for the lower degree of final devoicing than ofregressive voice assimilations, which were not covered in the pronunciation classes. When individual resultsare examined, it appears that there are even a few learners who do not produce final devoicing of stops orfricatives, but do produce regressive voice assimilation across word boundaries into English or who producethe former process less frequently than the latter. (The results of those participants are underlined in AppendixE, which presents individual speaker results.) The analysis thus suggests that Zsiga’s (2003) hypothesis that nolanguage learner should transfer cross-word assimilations but no (or fewer) intra-word processes cannot beconfirmed when extra-linguistic factors, such as explicit instruction on intra-word processes, come into play.The results of this study also find a partial counterpart in the results of a study on language contact by Bull(1992). Bull examined the production of postalveolarization by Sami-Norwegian bilinguals in a small village inthe north of Norway. This rule of postalveolarization turns clusters of /r/ followed by a dental into a postal-veolar and operates morpheme-internally, across morpheme boundaries within words and across word-boundaries and occurs in Norwegian, but not in Sami. Bull’s (1992) analysis revealed that the bilingual Nor-wegian-Sami speakers favoured the application of the rule across word-boundaries (92.5%) over its applica-tion in inflected, derivated and compounded positions (67.6%) and within morphemes (40.9%). Theseresults neatly tie in with those in the present study, where L2 speakers showed a preference for voicing rulesacross word-boundaries over the intra-word devoicing rule. The important difference between the studies isthat the rules in Bull’s study are rules which exist in the target language, while the rules in the present studyare present in the source, but not in the target language. Bull (1992, p. 32) argues that


[i]t is reasonable to assume that mother-tongue speakers are more conscious of their pronunciation ofindividual lexical items than of boundary phenomena. And that may explain why we have found thatthe frequency of clusters [as opposed to alveolars] is highest within morphemes, compared to positionsacross boundaries.

Since the rule of postalveolarization occurs in the target language of the bilingual speakers in Bull’s study,the less frequent production of postalveolarization in individual lexical items is puzzling. Bull’s hypothesisthat speakers are more conscious of intra-word than of across-word realisations would, however, explainthe results in our study, as participants produced fewer transfer errors within words than across word-boundaries. However, the individual frequencies are too small to predict that this will be a recurrent patternwhen more data of a larger number of learners are investigated. More research is clearly needed to examineto what extent Zsiga’s claim can be validated in various languages and with speakers differing in proficiencyin the L2.

5.2. Productivity of cross-word voicing rules

The second research question was to what extent cross-word voicing processes are transferred from the L1,Dutch, into the L2, English, and whether potential differences in productivity between the various assimilationprocesses could be attributed to universal principles of markedness. Fig. 6 summarizes the results of the pro-duction of voicing of coda obstruents in English in the three different positions discussed: preceding word-ini-tial voiced stops, vowels and sonorant consonants. Although assimilation before voiced stops targets bothstops and fricatives, Fig. 6 presents the results for target fricatives only, since the other two voicing processesaffect only fricatives and not stops (cf. also Appendix F).

We already noted that all three processes were very frequent in the L1 Dutch conversations (4.5). On thebasis of Fig. 6 two main observations can be made about these processes in the L2 English conversations:

First, paired samples t tests revealed that in all three environments voiced realisations of coda fricativeswere significantly more frequent when the fricative was voiced in the underlying form than when it was voice-less. Since the voiced realisations in L2 English are the result of positive transfer when the fricative is voiced inthe underlying form, but of negative transfer when the fricative is voiceless in the underlying form and theformer are significantly more frequent than the latter, this means that the participants have to some extentlearnt to suppress assimilation processes which lead to non-targetlike L2 structures.

A second observation is that all three voicing processes targeting coda fricatives are frequently transferredfrom Dutch into English, though there are differences between contexts.

As far as coda voiced fricatives are concerned, Fig. 6 shows that voiced fricatives were realized as voiced in91.80% of the tokens preceding voiced stops, in 81.78% of the tokens in prevocalic position and in 79.10% of

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before vcd. stop before vowel before son. C.

%

vcd. fric.vcl. fric.

Fig. 6. Voice assimilation of fricatives preceding voiced stops, vowels and sonorant consonants.


the cases preceding an onset sonorant consonant. Mauchly’s test of sphericity showed that the sphericityassumption was not violated (p = 0.690 > 0.05) and a repeated measures ANOVA (on participants 9–16)could thus be carried out to compare the frequencies with which coda voiced fricatives were realized as voicedin the three environments. The ANOVA revealed that the differences between the three contexts were not sig-nificant (F = 2.771, p = 0.097).

Coda voiceless fricatives are realized as voiced in 54.25% of the tokens preceding a voiced stop, in 20.6% ofthe tokens if the coda stop occurs in prevocalic position and in 27% of the phrases in which it occurs before aword-initial sonorant consonant.10

Because only five participants have values for the realisation of voiceless fricatives in all three contexts andthere is a wide range of within-group variation, no statistical assessment was carried out for the comparisonbetween all three contexts. Two additional comparisons between each time two processes were therefore car-ried out.

First, the frequency of assimilation of coda voiceless fricatives before voiced stops was compared to thatbefore vowels. The results of this comparison reveal that all participants who have values for both processesproduce assimilation in 54.25% of the tokens in which the coda voiceless fricative is followed by a voicedstop and in 23.75% of the tokens in which it occurs in prevocalic position. A two-tailed t test showed thatthis difference is statistically significant (t = 2.508, df = 10, p = 0.031). An explanation for this differencemay be that changing the voice specification of a coda obstruent preceding an onset obstruent is acousticallymuch less salient than changing the voice specification of an intervocalic fricative. In the Sonority Hierarchy(Selkirk, 1982) stops and fricatives are the least sonorous segments, below nasals, liquids and glides. Thegeneral ranking is thus

10 Thspeakewhen pcasualword b

stops < fricatives < nasals < liquids < glides

It has been argued that even within these low-sonority segments, the following hierarchy can be identified(Eckman and Iverson, 1993, p. 237):

voiceless stops < voiced stops < voiceless fricatives < voiced fricatives

In this hierarchy, voiced fricatives are the most sonorous and hence the acoustically most salient of theobstruents. Since advanced learners of an L2 tend to transfer the less salient properties from their L1 intothe L2, but succeed in suppressing the more salient ones, it is possible that the acoustic salience of intervo-calic voicing of fricatives led to a lower frequency of transfer. This is in line with Steriade’s functional, per-ception-based approach to laryngeal neutralisation. Steriade (1997, p. 2) formulates the Licensing by Cuehypothesis, which states that ‘‘laryngeal categories are neutralized in positions where the cues to the relevantcontrast would be diminished or obtainable only at the cost of additional articulatory maneuvers” and viceversa, that ‘‘laryngeal contrasts are permitted (or licensed) in positions that are high on a scale of percep-tibility”. Steriade proposes a perceptibility scale ranging from positions in which the voicing of the obstru-ent is more perceptible to environments where voicing is less perceptible. On this scale the context V_[+son]is ranked higher than V_[�son], which means that voicing is more perceptible in the former than in the lat-ter context and thus less likely to be subject to laryngeal neutralisation. This is in line with the finding in thepresent study that fricatives were more often subject to assimilation before voiced stops than in intervocalicposition.

Secondly, the production of voice assimilation of obstruents before voiced stops was compared to that ofassimilation of voiceless fricatives before sonorant consonants by the West-Flemish participants. The compar-ison showed that assimilation before voiced stops was produced in 83.2% of the tokens, while assimilationbefore sonorant consonants occurred in 79.61% of the tokens, a difference which is not significant (two-tailedpaired t test: t = 0.406, df = 7, p = 0.697). This finding is in line with the typological fact that languages which

ese percentages are higher than those reported by Cebrian (2000), who examined voice assimilations in the English IL of L1 Catalanrs and found that voiceless targets were realized as voiced in 20% of the cases when a voiced stop followed and in 22% of the casesreceding a vowel. One reason for the higher percentages in the present study may be that the data in this study consist of rapid,running speech, while Cebrian’s data are responses to word grouping tasks (e.g. deaf + neighbour, answer: ‘deaf neighbour’) anduilding tasks (member of a club, answer: ‘club member’) , which are likely to be somewhat less fluent.


have regressive voice assimilation before sonorants necessarily also have regressive voice assimilation beforestops, but not vice-versa. Mascaro notes that

‘‘it appears that languages present the obstruent-sonorant asymmetry in one direction: there is assimila-tion of obstruent to obstruent (Russian, (Warsaw) Polish, Dutch) and assimilation from obstruent toobstruent and to sonorant (Catalan, Spanish, (Cracow-Posnan) Polish), but not just obstruent to sono-rant alone, or obstruent to vowel alone” (Mascaro, 1995, p. 297).

This means that, if the West-Flemish participants had transferred regressive voice assimilation before sono-rant consonants into English, but had not (or to a much lesser extent) transferred regressive voice assimilationbefore voiced stops, the implicational universal which says that if a language has regressive voice assimilationbefore sonorants, it also has regressive voice assimilation before obstruents, would have been violated in theparticipants’ IL. This proved not to be the case, which might point to the fact that ILs obey the same impli-cational universal principles as L1 languages. However, more research on the presence or absence of L1 impli-cational universals in ILs are needed in order to validate this hypothesis.

6. Conclusion

The study has examined the production of final obstruent devoicing and cross-word voice assimilationsin a corpus of L1 Dutch and L2 English conversations between native speakers of Dutch in Belgium. Ananalysis of the corpus revealed that all processes were frequently produced in L1 Dutch and transferredinto L2 English. It was shown that the process of cross-word voice assimilation before voiced stops wasextremely productive and overruled the process of final obstruent devoicing. It was argued that this find-ing, which is not in line with Zsiga’s hypothesis that there should be no transfer of L1 cross-word processesbut not (or to a lesser extent) of intra-word processes, is presumably the result of explicit instruction on theabsence of final obstruent devoicing in English, and perhaps also of the greater consciousness of learners oftheir realization of individual lexical item than of cross-word realizations (cf. Bull, 1992, see Section 5.1).In order to test whether Zsiga’s hypothesis can be formulated as a strong claim or needs to be modified,more experimental and naturalistic data are needed. In particular, it would be interesting to collect conver-sational data before and after a training session containing explicit instruction and to compare the perfor-mance scores on intra-word and cross-word processes. Future research should also include an analysis ofvoicing in coda obstruents and obstruent clusters across word-boundaries in the target language, English.It is well known that voiced stops in English can be phonetically devoiced in prepausal context as well asbefore voiceless consonants and that some phonetic non-neutralising regressive voicing assimilation canoccur before voiced obstruents in British English (Jansen, 2007a). A phonetic analysis of the realisationof obstruents in casual running speech in English would allow us to establish just how much the L2 Eng-lish speech of L1 Dutch speakers deviates from actual English connected speech, recorded in the samecircumstances.

It was also shown that underlyingly voiceless obstruents were produced as voiced to a lesser extent thanunderlyingly voiced obstruents, revealing the influence of the target language on the learners’ productionsof L2 coda obstruents. Finally, aside from transfer from the L1 and pressure from the L2, the IL of theDutch-speaking participants is also influenced by universal principles of markedness. This was apparentfrom the analysis of final obstruent devoicing, which revealed that voiced fricatives, which are moremarked from an articulatory point of view and are cross-linguistically less frequent, were devoiced to amuch greater extent than coda voiced stops. This finding illustrates the way in which IL studies contributeto theoretical phonology: the markedness relation between coda voiced stops and fricatives cannot be dis-covered by examining the L1, in which neither are allowed, or the L2, in which both are allowed, butemerges in the IL system. The role of universal markedness relations was also apparent from the extentto which different assimilation processes were transferred. It was found that assimilation before sonorantconsonants was transferred to a much lesser extent than assimilation before voiced stops. This means thatthe IL system does not violate the implicational universal which says that if a language has assimilationbefore sonorant consonants, it also has assimilation before voiced stops. The study thus provides evidencefor the role of the L1, the pressure from the L2, the influence of universal principles of markedness and


the effect of explicit instruction on the shaping of an IL laryngeal system. Earlier studies have shown thatnon-native timing patterns lead to unnaturalness and—in some cases—unintelligibility (see Zsiga (2003)for an overview). Further research on the role of explicit and implicit instruction is needed to determineto what extent instruction plays a role in the acquisition of L2 processes. Johansson (2007, p. 314) pointsout that ‘‘the most basic problem of applied contrastive analysis” is ‘‘the problem that learning cannot beunderstood by a purely linguistic study”. And he claims that ‘‘[t]he question is not whether mother-tongueinfluence exists, but when and under what conditions”. In order to be able to go beyond predictions onthe basis of potential difficulties which are found on the basis of contrastive analysis, we need therefore asmany studies of the same phenomenon as possible, involving different languages and different groups oflearners. We should also use different methodologies to see to what extent the same or different resultsare arrived at. Natural language data are complementary to experimental ones. The present study hashopefully contributed to the task as far as transfer of devoicing and voice assimilation processes areconcerned.

Acknowledgements

The research reported on in this paper was funded by the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO).Thanks are due to all informants for their participation. I wish to thank Mieke Van Herreweghe for manyhelpful discussions, Paula Fikkert, Joe Pater and Beverley Collins for comments and feedback on earlierversions of this study and Chris Butler for much appreciated help with the statistical assessments. I amgrateful to two anonymous Language Sciences reviewers for their suggestions. Any remaining errors aremy own.

Appendix A

Voiced realisations of obstruents preceding onset voiced stops.

Context
vcd. stop]_[vcd.stop vcd. fric.]_[vcd. stop vcl. stop]_[vcd. stop vcl. fric.]_[vcd. stop
Language
L1 Da L2 Eb L1 D L2 E L1 D L2 E L1 D L2 E
Mean
88.89 100.00 95.45 91.80 82.14 63.14 94.96 54.25 nc 18 50 25 82 134 94 196 28 SD 33.33 0.00 0.00 8.82 26.41 31.47 6.47 39.26 t (one-tail) 1.000 1.918 1.868 3.986 df 7 10 15 10 p 0.175 > 0.05 0.042 < 0.05 0.041 < 0.05 0.001 < 0.05
a L1 D = L1 Dutch.b L2 E = L2 English.c n = the number of observations (i.e. possible assimilation sites).

Appendix B

Voiced realisations of fricatives preceding vowels.

Context
vcd. fric.]_[vowel vcl. fric.]_[vowel
Language
L1 D L2 E L1 D L2 E Mean (%) 90.06 81.78 84.79 20.68 n 87 417 361 82 SD 30.15 18.58 8.69 15.74 t (one-tail) 1.547 9.428 df 14 15 p 0.072 > 0.05 0.000 < 0.001


Appendix C

Voiced realisations of coda fricatives preceding onset sonorant consonants.

Context
vcd. fric.]_[son. C vcl. fric.]_[son. C
Language
L1 D L2 E L1 D L2E
Region
EF WF EF WF EF WF EF WF
Mean (%)
14.43 81.20 59.96 79.10 11.64 79.81 6.25 27.91 n 28 38 109 147 136 160 38 45 SD 10.00 20.20 48.29 9.64 0.00 14.43 17.68 34.64
Levene’s test
F = 2.579 F = 3.949 F = 3.714 F = 1.437 p = 0.134 p = 0.067 p = 0.075 p = 0.250
t (one-tail)
5.126 1.450 7.962 2.000 df 12 14 14 14 p 0.000 < 0.001 0.085 > 0.05 0.000 < 0.001 0.033 < 0.05
Appendix D

Production of voice assimilation processes in L1 West-Flemish Dutch.

Process
Assimilation before vcd. stops Voicing of prevocalic fric. Voicing before son. C. Context O]_[vcd. stop fric.]_[vowel fric.]_[son. C
Mean (%)
83.20 79.00 79.61 n 99 211 198 SD 5.13 17.68 15.01
Mauchly’s test
p = 0.127 ANOVA F = 0.195, p = 0.825
Appendix E

Comparison between word-internal final devoicing and cross-word voicing assimilation.

Inf. No.
Stops Fricatives
vcd.stop]_##
vcl.stop]_[vcd. stop vcd.fric.]_## vcl.fric.]_[vcd. stop
1
87.5 66.7 90 100 2 68.8 63.6 85.7 33.3 3 33.3a 80 75 66.7 4 12.5 75 42.1 50 5 25 100 100 6 50 50 85.7 100 7 75 100 66.7 8 20 50 100 0 9 0 25 81 50 10 0 66.7 11 100 83.3 50 66.7
(continued on next page)


Appendix E (continued)

Inf. No.
Stops Fricatives
vcd.stop]_##
vcl.stop]_[vcd. stop vcd.fric.]_## vcl.fric.]_[vcd. stop
12
33 50 25 80 13 25 50 75 14 100 33.3 85.7 15 0 83.3 100 50 16 100 100 90.9 0 Mean (%) 48.67 63.14 76.22 54.25 n 97 94 200 28 SD 39.40 32.58 25.52 39.26
t (two-tail)
1.838 1.424 df 14 10 p 0.087 > 0.05 0.185 > 0.05
Appendix F

Voice assimilation of fricatives preceding voiced stops, vowels and sonorant consonants.

Context
Before voiced stop Prevocalic voicing Before son. C.
Coda C.
vcd. fric. vcl. fric. vcd. fric. vcl. fric. vcd. fric. vcl. fric.
Mean (%)
91.80 54.25 81.78 20.68 79.10 27.90 n 82 28 417 82 147 45 SD 8.82 39.26 18.58 15.74 9.64 34.64
t
3.308 8.450 5.556 df 10 15 7 p (one-tail) 0.004 < 0.01 0.000 < 0.001 0.000 < 0.001
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