Obstruent voicing before sonorants: the case of West-Flemish

This article reports on an acoustic study of voicing in obstruents followed by a sonorant across a word boundary in two dialects of Dutch: East- and West-Flemish. In both varieties only gradient phonetic voicing was typically found in word-nal stops when a sonorant followed in the next word. In addition, West-Flemish showed optional categorical voicing in word-nal pre-sonorant fricatives. The voicing of fricatives is argued to be phonological, as it extends beyond the scope of automated coarticulation, and as the data pattern to form a distinct phonetic voicing target. However, the phonetic re... Mehr ...