Final devoicing as a robust phenomenon in second language acquisition: Tswana, english and afrikaans.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

The topic of this paper is the well-known phenomenon of final devoicing, which occurs in languages such as Afrikaans, Dutch, German and Russian. It is discussed against the background of second language acquisition. The aim of the discussion is threefold. First, a description is provided, based on original experiments, of the final devoicing that curiously takes place in the English utterances of Tswana native speakers. Second, the relevance of the results is pointed out to the theoretical notion of interlanguage phonology: this lies in the observation that both Tswana and English belong to the group of languages lacking final de- voicing: English essentially inexplicably lacks it, and Tswana completely lacks closed syllables. Third, details of the experiments are discussed, with data arrangements along several dimensions, taking into account the length of the vowel preceding the target consonant; the manner of articulation of the target consonant; and the notion that the speaker's output may be influenced by sociolinguistic considerations, such as hypercorrection.