Voicing and aspiration in Swedish stops

This paper presents the results of an investigation of voicing and aspiration in the speech of six Central Standard Swedish speakers with a view to providing an account of Swedish stop production. The data show that in utterance-initial position the two-way stop contrast is almost always realized as a contrast between prevoiced stops and postaspirated ones. Word-medially and -finally, the contrast is that of a fully voiced stop and, variably, an unaspirated or preaspirated stop. The female speakers show a greater tendency to preaspirate than the male speakers, and the male speakers have a greater tendency for prevoicing than the females. The commonly observed k>t>p ranking of aspiration duration is found for both preaspiration and postaspiration. Possible articulatory and aerodynamic reasons for these findings are discussed. The voicing vs. aspiration contrast that we observe in Swedish is one that has generally been considered to be typologically unusual. It is suggested that, in fact, such languages may not be as unusual as has been claimed in the literature, and that by increasing the level of phonetic detail in the description of stop contrasts in individual languages, the accuracy of typological statements concerning stop production can be improved.