We examined the production and perception of voiced versus voiceless obstruents by thirty-three adolescent heritage speakers of Polish and Russian. First, a word list task was used to elicit the production of voiced and voiceless plosives in word-initial position. Voice onset time (VOT) values for both sets of stops were compared to the values reported for monolingual Polish and Russian speakers. To investigate the perception of phoneme contrasts in the heritage language, we used an auditory phoneme discrimination task that contained ten minimal pairs of real and nonce words with contrasting voiced and voiceless obstruents. The results showed an almost perfect perceptual discrimination and a separation of voiced and voiceless plosives in production; however, the VOT values differed significantly from those of monolinguals. Both groups showed convergence of VOT values towards the values reported for fortis and lenis stops in the majority language (i.e., German), leading to a non-native accent in the heritage language.

The word consonant means 'with a sonant' or vowel. Consonants are one of two main types of speech sounds, the other being vowels. In the production of consonants, the vocal tract is blocked, the vocal tract is seriously constricted, or the airflow is diverted through the nasal passage. The term articulation is used for the movements and adjustments required to produce an individual speech sound. Consonants are classified by (1) whether the vocal folds are vibrating, (2) where in the vocal tract articulation takes place, and (3) the manner of articulation (the type of articulation). Manners of articulation include plosives, nasals, fricatives, and approximants, the latter of which can be broken down into laterals and glides. Other manners of articulation include trills. Consonants may be produced with a secondary articulation in addition to the primary articulation.

Irregular in its rhythms, inventive in diction, and rebarbatively directed against some hapless target, tough talk flourishes in verse satires of the period before making its way onto the stage, enjoying special prominence in Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour and John Marston’s Malcontent. In these plays no less than in the poems that precede them, tough talk remedies the alienation of public life in a crucial respect: Through its insistently corporeal language, tough talk gives a virtual body to a public that, as an imaginary entity, necessarily has none of its own. Because it compels vicarious identification by attacking people for their absurdities of comportment, tough talk is a style, but it is also the denuded expression of that judgment we recognize as taste. The vicarious relationship that tough talk, as judgment and style, coordinates between absent witness and present speaker finds its surprising culmination in the figure of the celebrity, a figure of taste whose insistent embodiment likewise invites vicarious identification from a bodiless public, often through pointedly antagonistic means. Early modernity’s great emblem of celebrity is Mary “Moll” Frith, the outspoken, cross-dressing pickpocket who found herself depicted as the outspoken protagonist of The Roaring Girl.