Temporal alignment of creaky voice in neutralised realisations of an underlying, post-nasal voicing contrast in German

The aim of the present experiment was to investigate the acoustic phonetic cues that could underlie a post-stress voicing distinction which, when considered on a segmental basis, appears to be neutralised. The data concern the difference in German between minimal pairs such as 'Enten' and 'enden' which in more casual speaking styles appear to show schwa and oral stop deletion and a surface realisation as a neutralised creaky voice nasal. We extracted from the Kiel Corpus all such contrasts that were judged by trained transcribers to have been neutralised in this way. We measured the spectral slope over the first two harmonics and the time at which the spectral slope first changed significantly. Our results show that, contrary to segmentally-based assumptions, /t, d/were distinguished depending on the onset time of creaky voice relative to the preceding vowel. These data are consistent with a model in which cues to segmental contrasts may be distributed non-segmentally in time.