Reviewed by Sabine Zerbian, University of the Witwatersrand
This collection, of which some articles were presented at a 2003 workshop in Leiden, compiles studies discussing theoretical, representational, acoustic, perceptual, and acquisitional aspects of voicing in Dutch. The empirical data covered range from final devoicing, fricative devoicing, and voicing assimilation to acoustic and perceptual cues of voiced and voiceless initial plosives in Dutch. The collection may be of interest to linguists whose specialty is in languages other than Dutch for two reasons. First, some of the empirical data discussed in this collection are also known from other languages, such as final devoicing, which is widespread in the West Germanic languages (with the exception of English). Second, the intricacy of the rules manipulating voice has informed theoretical claims about the correct featural representation of voice in phonological theory.
The collection contains six articles. Ch.1 by Wim Zonneveld, ‘Issues in Dutch devoicing: Positional faithfulness, positional markedness, and local conjunction’ (1–40), provides an optimality theoretic account of the intricate facts on devoicing in Dutch. It reviews the existing literature (both rule-based and constraint-based) and identifies the shortcomings of existing analyses.
In Ch. 2, ‘Representations of [voice]: Evidence from acquisition’ (41–80), René Kager, Suzanne van der Feest, Paula Fikkert, Annemarie Kerkhoff, and Tania S. Zamuner investigate the phonological representation of the feature that accounts for voicing and aspiration in initial plosives in English, Dutch, and German. The authors review the dispute in the literature as to whether one feature [voice] accounts for both voicing and aspiration differences, or if there are multiple features involved, namely [voice] for prevoicing in initial stops in Dutch, and [spread glottis] for aspiration in English and German. On the basis of data from early language acquisition in all three languages, it is argued that an analysis involving multiple features is appropriate.
Marc van Oostendorp presents an interesting dialectal exception to final devoicing in Dutch in Ch. 3, ‘Exceptions to final devoicing’ (81–98). Both eastern and southern dialects of Dutch lack final devoicing in the first person singular with a stem-final fricative showing a long vowel in the final syllable. The article suggests combining the morphological and phonological context into a phonotactic condition, arguing that phonologically, Dutch fricatives have a length contrast rather than a voicing contrast, and morphologically, the historical first person singular suffix is still present as an abstract vocalic position.
In Ch. 4, ‘Prevoicing in Dutch initial plosives: Production, perception, and word recognition’ (99–124), Petra M. van Alphen analyzes the voicing contrast in Dutch initial stops, which is commonly attributed to the presence and absence of prevoicing, i.e. vocal fold vibration during stop closure. The article discusses a series of psycholinguistic priming experiments that examine the effect of variation in prevoicing on word recognition. The results show that prevoicing is only used as a cue to word recognition if there are words in the lexicon that compete in initial voicing.
Ch. 5 by Wouter Jansen, ‘Dutch regressive voicing assimilation as a “low level phonetic process”: Acoustic evidence’ (125–52), presents data from a study on the voicing of word-final /ps/ sequences. The results show that obstruent + fricative sequences are not exempt from regressive voicing assimilation in Dutch, contrary to claims in the literature.
Mirjam Ernestus and R. Harald Baayen conclude this volume in Ch. 6, ‘Intraparadigmatic effects on the perception of voice’ (153–47). The authors address the incomplete neutralization of finally devoiced consonants. They present a perception task in which listeners rate neutralized plosives as more voiced. The authors suggest that perception is influenced by the listener’s knowledge of the obstruents’ realization in the word’s morphological paradigm.
In sum, by bringing together phonological, phonetic, and psycholinguistic research on voicing in Dutch, this volume advances the overall understanding of this phenomenon. Hopefully, more collections will be published that follow this approach.