A phonological pattern in which a normally voiced consonant in final-syllable position is replaced by a voiceless consonant, as in ‘bat’ for ‘bad’. It has been claimed that term ‘final consonant devoicing’ is inaccurate because the feature in question is tenseness, rather than voice, but this is not considered to be important in an account that is formulated segmentally rather than featurally. Final devoicing is a phonological process that occurs in a systematic manner in Dutch, Polish and Russian. This is also the case in second language acquisition, even when final devoicing is not typical of either the target language or the learner’s native language. In English, as children begin to produce words, they often go through a period in which they emit both voice and voiceless obstruents (stoppage of air flow from lungs resulting in fricative or plosive sounds, the latter including p and t sounds), but only voiceless ones in word-final position. If this phonological error persists, it can be a marker for an emerging speech disorder.
See Cluster reduction, Fricative, Phonological process, Phonology, Speech development, Stopping