The rarity of intervocalic voicing of stops in Danish spontaneous speech

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.’Theoretical and Experimental LinguisticsDescriptive and Comparative Linguistic

En alternativ, fonetisk baseret fonemanalyse af det danske konsonantsystem

Descriptive and Comparative LinguisticsTheoretical and Experimental Linguistic

English vocabulary in L1 Danish and L1 Finnish learners: Vocabulary sizes, word frequency effect, and cognate facilitation

The study presents vocabulary sizes in native (L1) Danish and L1 Finnish learners of English differing in second language (L2) immersion. The estimated vocabulary sizes suggest that some L2 learners have vocabulary sizes within the L1 English range, and that all participants should be lexically equipped to understand spoken English. The article moreover examines the effect of word frequency and cognateness on L2 lexical knowledge and how these two effects are mediated by L2 immersion. Word frequency was found to significantly affect word definition. Contrary to the prediction, this effect was larger for L1 English speakers than for L2 learners and for immersion learners than for non-immersion learners. Significant cognate facilitation was also observed and was found to be larger for non-immersion learners than for immersion learners, as predicted