When Phonetics Meets Morphology: Intervocalic Voicing Within and Across Words in Romance Languages

Intervocalic voicing is a process whereby a voiceless segment such as /ptk/ is realized as partially or totally voiced [bdg] when occurring between two vowels. It supposedly happens across-the-board in connected speech, where phonetics is blind to morphological boundaries (in our case, word edges) but only word-internal intervocalic voicing actually phonologizes, as in Lat. vita. Spa. vida. This means that a change currently happening can be identified if phonetic variation patterns differently at word edges and wordinternally. We provide an analysis of similar to 1000h of automatically aligned connected speech in five Romance languages to investigate intervocalic voicing of /ptk/ - as well as resistance to devoicing of /bdg/ - as a function of the stop's position in the word, i.e., internal (VCV), initial (V#CV), final (VC#V) and in isolation (V#C#V). Results show that voicing alternations in Portuguese are sensitive to word edges while French and Romanian are sensitive to the right word edge only and Spanish and Italian show no difference at word edges or internally. However, the surprising result is that word edges do not only sometimes show resistance to intervocalic voicing, but even tend toward devoicing of voiced stops.