Beyond VOT – phonation as a correlate of the laryngeal contrast in Polish

This article presents an acoustic experiment describing the effects of word-initial stop consonantvoicing on the realization of the following vowel in Polish. We provide data from 30 speakersand include a wide range of acoustic measures of voice quality, fundamental frequency, and thefirst formant of the vowel. Trajectories estimated with Generalized Additive Mixed Models andthe results of a Principal Components Analysis reveal that word-initial voiceless stops in Polishinduce slightly breathier modal phonation than voiced stops, particularly over the early portionof vowel duration. We also observe higher f0 and F1 frequencies at vowel onset after voicelessstops. Taken together, our results are suggestive of an active phonetic effect of voicelessnesson the acoustics of the following vowel. Implications of these results for current models oflaryngeal phonology are discussed.