The acoustics of plosive lenition in Dutch
Alexandra Pfiffner, Professor
Linguistics
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2023 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2024.
Lenition is a phonological process that refers to the weakening of segments in particular environments. There has been debate over what lenition means in phonetic terms, since there are many possible (and unrelated) processes labelled as lenition, such as plosives weakening to fricatives or approximants, affrication of plosives, flapping, voicing, debuccalization (a consonant becoming [h]), and even deletion. This project examines the acoustics of a particular variable lenition process in Standard Dutch via a corpus of read speech. The goals of this project are: (1) to quantify cases of plosive lenition in read speech in Dutch, (2) to examine the acoustics of various lenited forms, and (3) to test for possible linguistic and social conditioning factors of lenition.
Role: The undergraduate student research assistants will be responsible for:
1) examining sound files and TextGrids in Praat for cases of lenition
2) coding plosives for linguistic factors
3) helping with data analysis
Qualifications: Basic knowledge of acoustic phonetics is required (previous success in Ling 110). Previous experience using Praat is beneficial, but not necessary, as students will be trained specifically for this project.
Hours: 3-5 hrs