The rarity of intervocalic voicing of stops in Danish spontaneous speech

Abstract

Previous studies of the phonetics of Danish stops have neglected closure voicing. Danish is an aspiration language, but the aspirated stops /p t k/ are produced with shorter closure duration and less articulatory effort than the unaspirated stops /b d ɡ/. Furthermore, all Danish stops are characterized by some degree of glottal spreading during the closure. In this study, we use a corpus of Danish spontaneous speech (DanPASS) to investigate the intervocalic voicing—its distribution across the two laryngeal categories, whether it patterns as a lenition phenomenon, and whether the aerodynamic environment predicts its distribution. We find that intervocalic voicing is not the norm for either set of stops and is particularly rare in /p t k/. Voiced tokens are mostly found in environments associated with lenition. We suggest that the glottal spreading gesture found in all Danish stops is a phonological mechanism blocking voicing, which is probabilistically lost in spontaneous speech. This predicts our results better than relying on laryngeal features like [voice] or [spread glottis]. The study fills a gap in our knowledge of Danish phonetics and phonology, and is also one of the most extensive corpus studies of intervocalic stop voicing in an ‘aspiration language.’