Perspectives on final laryngeal neutralisation: new evidence from Polish

An acoustic experiment on final devoicing in Polish, aimed at providing new data on incomplete neutralisation, is described. The experiment was modelled on a study of German by Roettger et al. (2014), who mitigated possible effects of orthography by employing a word-formation task based on auditory stimuli, eliciting stop-final nonce words with underlying final voiced or voiceless stops. Our results provide some evidence for incomplete neutralisation in Polish, with an effect on closure duration, but not on preceding vowel duration, as well as interspeaker variation in the reliability of contrast maintenance. Considered against the background of studies from other languages, the results point to implementational differences in incomplete neutralisation effects as a function of laryngeal typology, which are accounted for in the Onset Prominence representational model.