Voice onset time in plosive occlusives in the oral speech of monolinguals in Russia

Abstract

The aim of the study is to identify the features of unvoiced and voiced plosive occlusives realised in the speech of monolinguals in Russia when reading a phonetically representative text aloud. It should be noted that the study is novel in that it is the first in Russian linguistics to use the parameter of voice onset time (VOT) to determine the voicing/devoicing of plosive occlusives. The authors consider VOT to be the most reliable acoustic parameter. As a result of the study, it was found that in the speech of Russian monolinguals, VOT was most often implemented incorrectly (positive VOT instead of negative), which is especially exemplified by the material of words starting with the sound [d] and one word in the speech of mostly adults, which is associated with speech fluency. The presence of pauses helped children to pronounce unvoiced and voiced consonants more correctly. Unvoiced consonants were pronounced instead of voiced ones in the speech of adult monolinguals. It should be said that other trends were noted in the speech of bilinguals. Basically, the range of voicing did not correspond to the reference values in both languages (Russian and German). Bilingual adults and children had their own system of parameters. As for unvoiced consonants, their values almost completely corresponded to the reference values of the Russian language, except for the consonant /k/.