Presentation

Acquisition of Word-Final Devoicing by American Learners of Russian

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Abstract

This study investigated the acquisition of the phonological rule of word-final devoicing by American learners of Russian and examined the effects of articulatory features, such as place of articulation, manner of articulation and palatalization, on the degree of voicing preserved in final obstruents. Twenty-six American learners of Russian participated in a word-learning task to memorize 24 target words and subsequently performed a picture-naming task. In order to control for previous lexical knowledge, frequency effects and phonetic environment, we used pseudowords that were matched to pictures of real objects, which were assigned a new meaning related to space travel. Minimal pairs were excluded to avoid task effects. The results suggested that learners did not fully acquire the rule of word-final devoicing in Russian despite the fact that voiceless consonants are unmarked and occur in English word-finally. Manner of articulation had a significant effect on the degree of voicing. Stops retained more voicing than fricatives.

How to Cite:

Simonchyk, A. & Darcy, I., (2014) “Acquisition of Word-Final Devoicing by American Learners of Russian”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 6(1).