Assimilation phenomena often attract phonologists’ interest, as they are common in every language. However, various assimilation phenomena remain unstudied, especially in terms of experimental...Show moreAssimilation phenomena often attract phonologists’ interest, as they are common in every language. However, various assimilation phenomena remain unstudied, especially in terms of experimental phonology and phonetics. One of the most common cases is /s/-voicing in Standard Modern Greek (SMG), i.e. the conversion of a voiceless [s] to a voiced /z/ when followed by a voiced consonant as a result of regressive voice assimilation. Most of the previous research indicates variability across speakers and across different types of consonants. Overall, the realization of /s/-voicing is described as gradient rather than categorical. Previous studies have only focused on /s/-voicing across word boundaries. However, /s/-voicing also occurs within the boundaries of a word. In many cases, clusters containing a sibilant and a voiced consonant are formed by morphological processes. This study aims to investigate the /s/-voicing across word boundaries, morpheme boundaries, and stem internally in order to describe the application of /s/-voicing in SMG in different morphological environments. For the goals of this study, native speakers of SMG were recorded during a production experiment. The speakers read aloud a number of passages designed to contain different cases of /s/-voicing. Various acoustic correlates were examined in order to describe the tokens phonetically and compare the assimilated tokens with the sibilant phonemes /s/ and /z/ of SMG. The applicaiton of voicing was measured as the ratio of the voiced part of over the total duration of the sibilant. The different morphological boundaries did not seem to clearly affect the application of /s/-voicing. However, the voicing ratio differs across the different types of following consonants as well as across speakers. These results confirm the previous literature in regard to the effect of the following consonant and between-speaker variability. The center of gravity was the most distinctive characteristic between assimilated and non-assimilated tokens and differences in terms of duration and intensity were found between the non-assimilated and [s] tokens as well as between assimilated and [z] tokens.Show less
