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15 - Phonetics of Stop Voicing in Heritage and Homeland Polish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2024

By
Naomi Nagy ,
Paulina Łyskawa ,
Emily Moran  and
Mateusz Urban
Edited by
Rajiv Rao
Rajiv Rao
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

We investigate acoustic correlates of the laryngeal contrast in intervocalic stops in three speech communities – homeland Polish speakers and first- and second-generation heritage Polish speakers in Toronto. Using a sample of 1,187 tokens extracted from conversational speech, we show that the employment of some parameters signaling laryngeal contrast differs between the homeland and heritage speakers. Some parameters are suppressed (i.e., closure phonation and duration) and some are amplified (i.e., vowel and release duration). We interpret these processes in light of proposals by Flege and Bohn (2021) and Polinsky (2018) regarding contact-induced interaction (i.e., assimilation versus dissimilation between languages). We propose that the interaction between systems occurs at a low level of granularity, that is, at the level of individual phonetic properties of a single phoneme.

Keywords

assimilationCanadadissimilationHeritage Language Variation and Change Corpuslaryngeal contrastPolishsociophoneticsvoicing
Type
Chapter
Information
The Phonetics and Phonology of Heritage Languages , pp. 321 - 342
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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