Vowel Duration, Closure Duration and Closure Voicing in Voice Contrast of Persian Word Final Plosives

Among stop consonants, voice is considered to be one of the distinctive features (Samareh, 1385:25). According to their position in one of the initial, medial or final position, they will get different acoustic properties. Previous studies show that among many acoustic cues to voicing, closure duration and closure voicing are present in all contexts including final position. Meanwhile, it has been documented than vowel duration is one of the main acoustic cues to voicing in VC position. This article examines the distinctive role of these acoustic cues among voiced and voiceless Persian plosives in word final position. Subjects read test words: /συδ//sut/, /suγ//suk/and /tub//tup/ each in the middle of a containing sentence. PRAAT software was used for the acoustical measurements and SPSS software was applied for the statistical analysis. Our measurements revealed that vowel duration, closure duration and closure voicing each can distinguish voicing categories for the test words and can be regarded as the potential acoustic cue to voicing in word final position.