On the ‘Incomplete Neutralization’ of German Final Obstruents

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Abstract
Recent work in acoustic phonetics purports to show that neutralization of the voiced/voiceless contrast in final position in German is only apparent, because it is incomplete. Thus, a recent study shows that native speakers of German do regularly devoice word-final obstruents, but they also produce slightly longer vowels before the morphophonemically voiced obstruents (e.g. Rad ‘wheel’) than before the voiceless ones (e.g. Rat ‘advice’). However, our work replicating these studies indicates that the previously observed differences actually resulted from hypercorrect spelling pronunciation, and that in more natural linguistic contexts the neutralization is indeed complete.

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