Temporal and Devoicing Analysis of European Portuguese Fricatives

Abstract

Duration and devoicing of Portuguese fricatives have been studied using a set of corpora that include nonsense words following Portuguese phonological rules, and real words; these were recorded by four subjects (2 male, 2 female). Results show that fricative duration varies most with voicing (voiceless are longer), and also significantly by speaker, place, and position within word. Devoicing occurs most often word-finally, and varies significantly by place; devoicing occurs more often than in English